C. elegans: the cell lineage and beyond

摘要

Thank you so very much for inviting me to be here. It gives me a mingled sense of humility at how much I owe to others, and of joy that the collective work on the worm has been recognized in this way. Among the first of my many mentors was my PhD supervisor. Colin Reese, who was developing non-aqueous methods for oligonucleotide synthesis (e.g., Fromageot et al., 1968). Colin passed me on to my postdoctoral supervisor Leslie Orgel at the Salk Institute, to work on prebiotic chemistry. The plan wasto see to what extent we could copy RNA chains without enzymes. The products were in low yield, and the challenge was to work out the sequences that had been produced. We used cutting with different ribonucleases, and chromatography to separate the fragments (e.g., Sulston et al., 1968). My introduction to C. elegans came in 1969 with my move, at Leslie's suggestion, to Sydney Brenner's group at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Fig. 1.). Sydney was reputed to be setting upa group to work on the nervous system of a nematode, though at that point nobody knew much about it (Brenner, 1973).