[
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
[
Dev Cell,
2002]
Presenilins mediate they-secretase cleavage of Notch transmembrane receptors as well as the transmembrane P-amyloid precursor protein (PAPP), but they are not thought to accomplish this alone. Recent genetic screens in C. elegans, presented in this issue of Developmental Cell, identify two genes that are essential to gamma-secretase activity and may interact with presenilins.
[
J Cell Biol,
2007]
Cells must break symmetry to acquire polarity. Microtubules have been implicated in the induction of asymmetry in several cell types, but their role in the Caenorhabditis elegans zygote, a classic polarity model, has remained uncertain. One study (see Tsai and Ahringer on p. 397 of this issue) brings new light to this problem by demonstrating that severe loss of microtubules impairs polarity onset in C. elegans.