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.
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.
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.
The transition to the aggregative stage of Capsaspora owczarzaki, a close unicellular relative to Metazoa, is associated with significant upregulation of orthologs of genes that are important for multicellularity in metazoans.
A cluster of cofilin along an otherwise bare actin filament induces distinctively asymmetric cooperative conformational changes to the filament on either side of the cluster.
