High impact information on elt-1

• Depending on their lineage history, cells that become epidermal in wild-type embryos become either neurons or muscle cells in elt-1 mutant embryos [1].
• In the present paper, we show that either elt-3 or elt-1 is sufficient, when force expressed in early embryonic blastomeres, to activate a program of hypodermal differentiation even in blastomeres that are not hypodermal precursors in wild-type embryos [2].
• The elt-1 RNAi phenotype shows that seam cells are essential for the structural integrity of adult hermaphrodites in the vulval region and for diametric shrinkage during dauer larval formation [3].
• Reporter gene studies show that elt-1 expression is maintained in lateral seam cells throughout development and elt-1 RNA interference experiments support an essential role for elt-1 in the differentiation of lateral seam cells in the embryo [3].
• The Caenorhabditis elegans GATA transcription factor elt-1 has previously been shown to have a central role in the specification of hypodermal (epidermal) cell fates and acts several cell divisions before the birth of hypodermal cells [3].

Biological context of elt-1

• The elt-1 reporter gene is also expressed in neurones of the locomotory circuit [3].
• These effects are specific in that two other C. elegans GATA factors (elt-1 and elt-3) do not cause ectopic gut gene expression [4].

Anatomical context of elt-1

• These results further demonstrated that elt-1 was highly expressed in the germ-line of both sexes [5].

Other interactions of elt-1

• We suggest that neither the elt-1 protein nor the skn-1 protein interacts directly with the ges-1 gene and that the observed binding proteins must correspond to products of other genes [6].
• We have found that elt-1 is required for the formation of most, but not all, elt-3-expressing cells [7].

References