Novel high-throughput co-culture assays reveal how the spatial structure of colony biofilms provides opportunities for nutrient and matrix sharing and may drive the evolution of cooperative behaviors.
Optogenetic experiments show that bridging microtubules buffer chromosome movements and promote their alignment through forces transferred to the associated kinetochore fibers, which rely on precise regulation of the overlap region.
A three-dimensional investigation of extinct-tetrapod limbs shows that even though bone elongation and blood-cell production are intimately related to mammal long bones, these functions actually appeared successively in tetrapod evolution.
Rudimentary cross-catalytic replication can be established by double-hairpins of tRNA-like sequences, implying that replication and translation could have emerged along a common evolutionary trajectory.
β-Catenin-mediated expansion of nephron progenitors is independent of direct β-catenin/chromatin engagement, while progenitor induction proceeds with a β-catenin-driven switch of repressive TCFL1/TCFL2 to activating TCF7/LEF1 factors on transcriptionally poised enhancers.
Mutations that affect a metabolic network generically exhibit epistasis, which propagates to higher level phenotypes, such as fitness, carrying some information about the network’s topology.
