Site-specific recombinases have, for the past 20 years, been one of the most powerful tools in studying the functions of all sorts of genes. Most widely used as the Cre/lox-based system for inserting or deleting genes in mice, transgenic analyses have told us volumes about animal development1. For instance, mouse genetic knockouts are routinely the [...]

As always, it’s these odd conjunctions of things that don’t go together that catches the eye. In this case, molecular and sociology. The actual article1 is much more mundane and true to the correct science jargon, and included in a special section of the most recent Nature on “Proteins to Proteomes.” It’s also a nice [...]

This month’s Nature Genetics has an article introduced with the catchy title Aging and cancer: killing two birds with one worm. That’s referring to using C. elegans as a model organism, of course, due to its utility as a model organism for genetic research. Pinkston-Gosse and Kenyon follow a C. elegans-ortholog of FOXO transcription factors, [...]