It's time to exploit your favorite quirky organism with new technologies.

Abstract

We live in a competitive world where, at any given moment, our peers might achieve the very discoveries we hope to make with our own research. This reality creates butterflies in the stomachs of those who are engaged in risky experiments. Any hesitation or setback, even momentary, can make you feel that by the time you are in a position to pursue your own direction, every novelty will already have been discovered. But don't worry, for many years to come there will be plenty of biology waiting to be investigated with many questions we haven't yet thought of asking. I think that the most important field in biology today is developmental biology. During development, it is thought that each event or structure is consequential to a preceding event or structure and that the layering of subsequent processes ultimately brings the phenotype into being. This process is also studied by those in the field we now call epigenetics, which, I believe, is modern developmental biology armed with state‐of‐the art genomics tools and systems bioinformatics. I want to know how a fertilized egg with one genome can give rise to a dazzling variety of cell types in which all genomes are the same as that of the egg, …