皮哩皮哩

Transcript

Sam Diamond: You鈥檙e now At the Lab with 皮哩皮哩. My name is Sam Diamond and this week At the Lab, 鈥淭he time of our lives.鈥�

SD: 鈥淟ife moves pretty fast. If you don鈥檛 stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.鈥�

SD: In case you鈥檙e unfamiliar, that鈥檚 the famous 20th-century philosopher鈥攕lash fictional high school student鈥擣erris Bueller.

Economics Teacher: 鈥淏ueller? Bueller?鈥�

SD: Ferris is an expert in stopping to look around at life in action. Here at 皮哩皮哩, developmental biologists are interested in looking at life at its earliest and most fundamental stages. Here鈥檚 CSHL Professor Christopher Hammell.

Chris Hammell: Genes are controlled by sets of machinery, and you turn genes on and off. And for developmental biologists, we鈥檙e interested in figuring out basically how that sets up the body plan of the organism. One of the things that鈥檚 been underappreciated in developmental biology is how timing becomes important for that. So, it really is an intuitive problem. You wouldn鈥檛 start making fingernails on an arm until you had started to make the arm.

SD: To get to the bottom of this problem, Hammell is looking closely at a kind of worm known as C. elegans. These worms are the perfect test subjects to study the timing of development, because 1) they only live for about 20 days, and 2) they鈥檙e see-through.

SD: Hammell and his collaborators came up with a new imaging technique to capture gene expression as it occurs inside C. elegans. They identified a quartet of molecules that time the animal鈥檚 growth stages with a concerto-like precision.

CH: This clock we鈥檝e discovered sets up the cadence of that song of development. It鈥檚 a coordinator of the orchestra. It controls when the trombone goes, how loud it gets, and how long the note lasts.

SD: This is the first time that gene expression has ever been captured in real time throughout an animal. But perhaps even more incredible, the mechanism that times C. elegans鈥� development works a little bit like circadian clocks. You know鈥攖he thing we plan our days around.

SD: There鈥檚 still a lot of work to be done before we can figure out how our developmental clocks enable us to become complex characters like Ferris Bueller or his best friend Cameron Frye. But you can rest assured our scientists aren鈥檛 letting the mysteries of life pass us by. We鈥檙e looking at them up close every day.

{Musical excerpt from Ferris Bueller鈥檚 Day Off}

SD: Thanks for listening to At the Lab. Please be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us at cshl.edu for more fascinating stories like this one. For 皮哩皮哩, I鈥檓 Sam Diamond. And I鈥檒l see you next time At the Lab.