[
Science,
2002]
As any homeowner knows, timely maintenance is vital for keeping a building functioning properly after construction is finished. The same is evidently true for the complex architecture of the nervous system - at least in the roundworm. On page 686, neuroscientists Oliver Hobert, Oscar Aurelio, and David Hall describe a new family of proteins that help keep the wiring of the worm's nervous system tangle free.
[
Nature,
1994]
On page 32 of this issue, a joint team from the Genome Sequencing Center (St. Louis, USA) and the newly founded Sanger Centre (Hinxton Hall, Cambridge, UK) report a contiguous sequence of over two megabases from chromosome III of the nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. This is the longest contiguous DNA sequence yet determined, and it prompts rumination on how far we have come in the sequencing enterprise, and on how far - and where - we have