Meredith C Schuman, Kathleen Barthel, Ian T Baldwin
A 2-year field study has demonstrated that volatile compounds produced by plants when they are attacked by herbivores act as defenses by attracting predators to the herbivores and increasing the reproduction of the plants.
Preventing premature interactions between microtubules and protein-based structures called kinetochores ensures that chromosomes are segregated by meiosis rather than mitosis in reproductive cells.
The discovery of a fluorescent protein that can be rapidly switched between long-lived ‘on’ and ‘off’ states will lead to a new generation of super-resolution imaging experiments on living cells.
Simulations and experiments on systems containing two different populations of microorganisms show that interactions that benefit at least one of the populations can lead to communities with stable compositions, and that strong cooperation between two populations can lead to communities in which both populations are mixed together.
Verena Pawlak, David S Greenberg ... Jason ND Kerr
Changing the order in which presynaptic and postsynaptic cells are repeatedly activated can change what a mammalian visual cortex neuron communicates to downstream neurons.
The nematode worm C. elegans consumes familiar bacterial species more rapidly than it does novel ones, and this preference for familiarity is mediated by a pair of serotonergic neurons.
Tijana Ivanovic, Jason L Choi ... Stephen C Harrison
Long-lived intermediate states formed by glycoprotein catalysts are an essential part of the process used by influenza virus particles to infect cells.
Ursula Schulze-Gahmen, Heather Upton ... Tom Alber
Structure-function analysis of the super elongation complex formed when HIV replicates inside cells reveals that the HIV-1 Tat protein binds to a cleft between P-TEFb, an enzyme that is involved in normal transcription, and AFF4, a protein that is used to build the super elongation complex
A protein complex that enables cells to transport substances across their membranes, and that typically consists of four subunits, can also function as two hemicomplexes, each with two subunits.
