Maternal histone methyltransferases antagonistically regulate monoallelic expression in .

Undefined epigenetic programs act to probabilistically silence individual autosomal alleles, generating unique individuals, even from genetic clones. This sort of random monoallelic expression can explain variation in traits and diseases that differences in genes and environments cannot. Here, we developed the nematode to study monoallelic expression in whole tissues, and defined a developmental genetic regulation pathway.

A toolkit for DNA assembly, genome engineering and multicolor imaging for .

One way scientists can observe and quantify processes in living cells is to engineer the genomes of animals to express multiple fluorescent proteins and then quantify those signals by various imaging techniques. To allow our laboratories to confidently quantify mixed (overlapping) fluorescent signals for our studies in the basic biology of gene expression and aging in , we developed a comprehensive toolkit for that we describe here. The Toolkit consists of two components: 1) a series of vectors for DNA assembly by homologous recombination (HR) in the yeast, and 2) a set of ten worm strains that each express a single, spectrally distinct fluorescent protein, under control of either the or promoters.