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[
Genes Dev,
2008]
Semaphorins play diverse roles in axon guidance and epithelial morphogenetic cell movements. In this issue of Genes & Development, Nukazuka and colleagues (1025-1036) show that semaphorins regulate Caenorhabditis elegans male tail morphogenesis by stimulating the translation of specific messages, including the actin-depolymerizing enzyme cofilin.
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[
Curr Biol,
2015]
Hermaphroditism leads to reduced sexual selection and can result in the retention of deleterious mutations. A new study characterizes one such mutation that results in male-male copulation in nematodes, while also implicating a previously undescribed source of chemical signaling.
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[
Elife,
2015]
Male nematode worms may make larger sperm than hermaphrodite worms, but this is not the only reason that sperm from males have a competitive edge.
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[
Curr Biol,
2013]
A century ago, Bridges proposed that male genes on the autosomes and female genes on the X chromosome compete to determine sexual identity. New genetic and molecular studies establish Caenorhabditis elegans as the first animal known to use this mechanism.
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[
Curr Biol,
2020]
In nematodes, TRA-1 represses the transcription of genes involved in male differentiation, allowing XX animals to undergo normal hermaphrodite development. New reports show that this transcription factor also acts in XO males, to control the differentiation of many neurons.
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[
Curr Biol,
2016]
Male nematodes secrete pheromones that accelerate the somatic senescence of potential mates. A new study shows that this harm most likely is an unintended by-product of the males' aim to speed up sexual maturation and delay reproductive senescence of future partners.
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[
Curr Biol,
2010]
Defects in meiosis can produce different checkpoint responses in female and male animals, suggesting that meiotic checkpoints exhibit sexual dimorphism. A recent study in Caenorhabditis elegans indicates that meiotic checkpoint activation is similar between the sexes and the primary difference lies in the downstream consequences.
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[
Dev Cell,
2007]
The C. elegans male sex-determining protein, FEM-1, has been identified as a substrate recognition subunit of a Cullin-2 ubiquitin ligase complex. This complex controls the level of TRA-1A, a Ci/Gli homolog and master regulator of sex determination, by ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis.
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[
Dev Cell,
2015]
In this issue of Developmental Cell, Elewa etal. (2015) show that combinatorial action of RNA binding proteins modulates poly(A) tail length of maternal mRNAs, leading to asymmetric expression of a cell fate determinant in early C.elegans embryos. Genome-wide profiling suggests this mechanism may be widely used to establish cell identities.
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[
Genes Dev,
2002]
The CM domain is a cysteine-rich DNA-binding motif first recognized in proteins encoded by the Drosophila set determination gene doublesex (Erdman and Burtis 1993; Zhu et al. 2000). As the name doublesex (dsx) suggests, this gene has functions in both sexes: Its transcripts undergo sex-specific alternative splicing, so that it can encode either a male-specific isoform, DSX(M), or a female-specific isoform, DSX(F) (Baker and Wolfner 1988; Burtis and Baker 1989). These proteins have the same N-terminal DNA-binding domain, but different C termini that confer different regulatory properties on the two forms. The expression of DSX(M) directs male development, and the expression of DSX(F) directs female development, throughout most of the somatic tissues of the fruit fly.