[
Nat Methods,
2011]
Engineering precise genetic changes in a genome is powerful way to study gene function, and several recent papers describe new applications of gene-editing tools. Working with researchers at Sangamo BioSciences, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Barbara Meyer and her colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, described the first systems for making targeted genomic modifications in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a valuable model organism (Wood et al., 2011).
[
Cell,
1999]
Cell death in universally important in development, not the least in the nervous system, but little is known about how the programmed cell deaths of cells and neurons are ultimately controlled. Much of the understanding of cell death has come from research on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (reviewed by Metzstein et al., 1998). Conradt and Horvitz (1999 [this issue of Cell]) now extend this work to provide a satisfyingly complete explanation for the sex-specific death of one particular neuron type in this animal. In so doing, they link up two extensively studied regulatory pathways in C. elegans, one controlling sexual phenotype, and one controlling cell death.