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.

The HITS-CLIP sequencing method is used to demonstrate that cryptic exons can detect messenger RNA that contains nonsense mutations, and then cause this RNA to decay, which shows that these exons are involved in maintaining the electrical balance of neurons and, possibly, preventing epilepsy.

The enzyme that collaborates with ubiquitin ligases to promote the release of defective polypeptides from stalled ribosomes in a process named ribosome-associated degradations has been identified as the ATPase Cdc48.

A transmembrane protein uses distinct mechanisms to regulate the movement of specific toll-like receptors-key immune system components involved in detecting pathogens-to their final locations inside cells.

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.

The Notch signaling pathway has a central role in the formation of the circuit that controls egg-laying in the nematode worm C. elegans.