In this episode we hear about biofilms in bacteria, drug production, gender bias in peer review, nematode worms and how synchronising brain waves can boost memory.
Ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist and experimental model for schizophrenia, produces decision-making deficits in monkeys, which are predicted by a lowering of cortical excitation-inhibition balance in a spiking circuit model.
Maternal positional information in the fly embryo can be read rapidly in spite of the gene-expression bottleneck and general examples of regulatory architectures that combine speed and accuracy are provided.
A chromatin remodeling factor cooperates with Wnt signaling pathway to transcribe erythropoietin in the adult liver, inducing its secretion and a dramatic erythropoiesis in the spleen.
A binary cell fate decision to be or not to be stomata is regulated by multiple peptide ligands, each triggering a unique subcellular dynamics of their shared receptor.
P2ry12-CreER robustly and specifically labels microglia in fate-mapping and ribosomal profiling experiments, revealing new markers for myeloid subpopulations in the central nervous system.
The juxtacrine signaling molecule EphA7, when expressed on terminally-differentiated myocytes, non-cell-autonomously induces adjacent myoblasts to also commit to terminal differentiation leading to rapid coordinated differentiation across the entire population.
The activin ligand myoglianin acts as a temporal extrinsic cue to regulate the intrinsic temporal factor Imp in mushroom body neuroblasts, increasing neuronal diversity by specifying the α’β’ fate.
