The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum employs a terpene synthase-cytochrome P450 metabolic gene cluster to produce a novel trisnorsesquiterpene discodiene.

Inactivation of the Dictyostelium orthologue of the tumour suppressor Neurofibromin (NF1) enables amoebae to ingest dissolved nutrients using macropinocytosis more rapidly, and to prey on larger organisms using phagocytosis.

The probability of a cellular response to a differentiation inducing signal is correlated with the dynamic expression of a Ras protein, and produces a ‘salt and pepper’ pattern of cell differentiation.

Efficient dedifferentiation is characterized by robustness to mutation, flexibility in ordering of cellular events and reversal of developmental changes along a single gene expression trajectory.

There should be a prominent place for theory within biology papers, both as Results in papers that combine experiment and theory, and as Results in theory papers.

Eukaryotic chemotaxis to live bacteria was quantified at a high throughput level, for the first time, and mechanistically examined for the interrelationship between chemotaxis and phagocytosis.

Sponges and ctenophores lack hypoxia-inducible factors, suggesting that the metazoan last common ancestor could have lived aerobically under severe hypoxia and did not need to regulate its transcription in response to oxygen availability.

A canonical class III adenylate cyclase with a membrane anchor of six transmembrane spans is regulated by a receptor of similar design, the quorum-sensing receptor from Vibrio harveyi.

The structural architecture of the 4-subunit, RNA-binding human negative elongation factor NELF is derived by a combination of X-ray crystallography and protein crosslinking.