[
Science,
1999]
Elizabeth Pennisi, in her excellent commentary "Worming secrets from the C. elegans" (News Focus, 11 Dec 1998, p.1972), states that "The first person to sense that the worm might take on such a prominent role in biology was molecular biologist Sydney Brenner." I am sure that Brenner would wish to acknowledge the role that Ellsworth C. Dougherty played in this matter. Dougherty originally described in 1949, "[a] new species of the free-living nematode genus Rhabditis of interest in comparative physiology and genetics".
[
Curr Biol,
2000]
During signaling by the Notch receptor, Notch's intracellular domain is cleaved, moves to the nucleus and associates with a DNA-binding protein of the CSL class (CSL for CBF1, Suppressor of Hairless (Su(H)), LAG-1); as a result, target genes are transcriptionally activated (reviewed in [1,2]). In Caenorhabditis elegans, a glutamine-rich protein called LAG-3 forms a ternary complex with the Notch intracellular domain and LAG-1 and appears to serve as a transcriptional activator that is critical for signaling [3]. Although database searches failed to identify a LAG-3-related protein, we surmised that Notch signaling in other organisms might involve an analogous activity.