Ground Polarity (Jennie's Song)

video here


If you're going for symmetry, you need a central cue
So if you're P7.p, you can use mom-2
But which direction do you pick when you lack Frizzled and Ryk?
Looks like you face posterior by default
But that's a model that we take with a grain of salt
Yeah, what happens if you get rid of all the Wnts?
You'll find there's ground polarity, it's something you can always see
When you take away the central cue
And beneath that ground polarity, it's default stochasticity
Without a Wnt, they haven't got a clue.

What's CAM-1's function? Jennie wanted to see
Could it inhibit induction non-autonomously?
And the result was quite the same even without the kinase domain-
It could work in nearby tissues so she started to think
That CAM-1 might be acting as a Wnt sink!
So what does the binding constant of CAM-1 need to be in order to
sequester enough Wnt molecules to inhibit signaling?

Revealing ground polarity, it's something you can always see
when you take away the central cue,
and beneath that ground polarity it's default stochasticity
that hs:CAM-1 can reveal to you.

That old model is passe, you need multiple Wnts
With her reverse-binding assay, Jennie caught this glimpse:
If it's default you wanna score, heat-shock CAM-1 in lin-44
It shows there's a polarity that must get refined.
But isn't there another function that we ought to keep in mind?
Yeah, didn't she show that CAM-1 is more than a Wnt sink?
It acts in ground polarity, established by egl-20
and regulating SYS-1 with Van Gogh,
and in that ground polarity, CAM-1 needs its ICD
That kinase might not be so dead, you know.

With a paper in Development, and another in Cell
There's more than a little hint, that she'll do well
It's true that Jennie is no wuss, she's off to postdoc with Roel Nusse.
I can't believe she's leaving, I'm really quite sad
But at least she won’t be here to make the rest of us look bad!
And we'll always have something to remember her by...
We’ll think of ground polarity, established by egl-20
and regulating SYS-1 with Van Gogh,
and in that ground polarity, CAM-1 needs its ICD
That kinase might not be so dead, you know.

Look for the ground polarity, it's something you can always see
when you take away the central cue,
and beneath that ground polarity it's default stochasticity
that hs:CAM-1 can reveal to you
Those VPCs they don't know what to do
Without a WNT, they haven't got a clue.

To the tune of "Bare Necessities"

chorus
C-C- F- F- C-C-G-G7
C-C-F-F-C-G-C (strum down...)
verse
G-G-C-C-G-G-C-C7
F-G7-C-D7
talking
(strum up...)