Mechanisms that tether and release replicated sister chromatids to produce sperm and eggs rely extensively on meiotic cohesin complexes that are endowed with unexpectedly different properties specified by a single interchangeable subunit, the α-kleisin.
Carine Gubelmann, Petra C Schwalie ... Bart Deplancke
A large-scale transcription factor screen reveals over twenty novel adipogenic regulators: most notably ZEB1, which exerts essential transcriptional control of fat cell differentiation.
Tertiary folding of the Rev-response element (RRE) in HIV RNA ensures the rapid formation of the Rev-RRE viral ribonucleoprotein particle via a two-step process.
Bacterial viruses are an unexpected ‘third party’ that imposes a strong predatory pressure on a bacterial pathogen during the natural course of infection in humans.
Romeo Papazyan, Ekaterina Voronina ... Sean D Taverna
A previously unappreciated histone methylation pathway helps limit DNA double-strand break formation and recombination in heterochromatin during meiosis.
Brian A Sosa, F Esra Demircioglu ... Thomas U Schwartz
LAP1 adopts an AAA+ like fold that, while unable to bind nucleotide, can enhance ATPase activity in the neighboring TorsinA protomer in an unusual heterohexameric ring, via an arginine finger.
Paul T Conduit, Jennifer H Richens ... Jordan W Raff
The proteins DSpd-2 and Centrosomin assemble into dynamic scaffolds that build from the inside out around the mother centriole and support centrosome maturation.
An immune system pattern recognition receptor potentiates anti-tumor innate immune responses, offering new insight into anti-tumor activity of the innate immune system.
Julie L Aspden, Ying Chen Eyre-Walker ... Juan-Pablo Couso
Thousands of small Open Reading Frames are translated, and form two distinct classes based on their translational efficiency and bioinformatic indicators.
The ribosomal protein, Rps27l, plays an oncogenic role by promoting p53 degradation via stabilizing the Mdm2-Mdm4 complex, but a tumor suppressor role by preventing the aneuploidy and loss of p53 heterozygosity.
Empirical evidence suggests that the hippocampus constructs maps of spatial environments based on the relative locations of places (i.e., topology), rather than absolute distances and coordinates (i.e., geometry).
An optimized CRISPR-Cas9 system enables multiplexed genome engineering for evolving biomolecules and pathways from chromosomally integrated DNA libraries.
Gaining genetic control over neural modules that drive the grooming of each Drosophila body part reveals how mechanisms for selecting among competing behavioral choices are used to generate sequences of actions.
A Swedish national cohort study reveals that children with a family history of alcohol use disorders have an increased risk of autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Katrin Vogt, Christopher Schnaitmann ... Hiromu Tanimoto
One memory center in the fly brain processes distinct appetitive and aversive associative memories of olfactory and visual cues using shared local circuits.
X-ray crystallography reveals the structural framework for understanding the function of mammalian transcriptional repression in the cellular circadian clock.
The bacterium Escherichia coli possesses a permissive cytoplasmic environment and the requisite molecular machinery to support the propagation of prions.
Building on previous work (Bai et al., 2013), we describe an algorithm that allows cryo-EM structure determination to near-atomic resolution for protein complexes as small as 170 kDa.
Mirko Messa, Rubén Fernández-Busnadiego ... Pietro De Camilli
Epsin has a key role in the coupling of actin to endocytic clathrin coated pits that is required for their maturation and helps capture SNAREs at endocytic clathrin coated pits.
Building on previous work (Diao et al., 2012), we show that the mechanism by which complexin suppresses spontaneous fusion is distinct from the mechanism by which it synchronizes Ca2+-triggered fusion.
Neuroimaging provides novel insights into how the motor system represents sequences of actions by automatically separating their spatial and temporal features for flexible skill production.
Shawn McClelland, Gary P Brennan ... Tallie Z Baram
Uncovering the mechanisms by which the transcription factor NRSF contributes to the development of epilepsy reveals that the regulation of gene expression by transcription factors in the brain is more finely-tuned than previously thought.
Alessandro Costa, Ludovic Renault ... James M Berger
The Mcm2-7 motor unwinds DNA using an approach distinct from that of superfamily III helicases, and accesses multiple ring configurations and assembly states during the initiation of DNA replication.
A non-coding RNA-based targeting mechanism could potentially epigenetically maintain specialized chromatin structures, such as the centromere, in vivo.
Tingting Liu, Ariel Kaplan ... Carlos J Bustamante
‘Optical tweezers’ measurements of single ribosomes and single mRNA molecules show that the translation rate depends exponentially on the applied force, and suggests that the ribosome functions as a Brownian ratchet.
microRNAs can serve as a surveillance system to repress nonsense mRNAs by recognizing miRNA-responsive elements in the open reading frame region downstream of the premature termination codon.
Ramiro Nández, Daniel M Balkin ... Pietro De Camilli
Studies of Lowe syndrome patient cells, which lack the inositol 5-phosphatase OCRL, suggest that a defect in endocytosis plays a role in the pathological manifestations of the disease.
Using linked TOG domains that each bind a curved conformation of αβ-tubulin, a microtubule polymerase catalyzes fast elongation by concentrating αβ-tubulin near the polymer end.
Diasynou Fioravante, YunXiang Chu ... Wade G Regehr
Genetic and electrophysiology experiments provide the first direct evidence that protein kinase C is a calcium-sensing protein in post-tetanic potentiation, a form of synaptic plasticity that supports short-term memory.
Hui Zhao, Bernard Thienpont ... Diether Lambrechts
A comprehensive catalogue of somatic mutations accumulating in MMR-deficient tumors highlights their relevance in the context of human genetic evolution, for the diagnosis of microsatellite instability and the provision of targeted treatment options.
