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.
A unique form of regulation has been observed in the unfolded protein response of S. pombe, along with a novel mechanism of post-transcriptional mRNA processing.
Histones bound to lipid droplets inside cells offer protection against bacteria in flies, and possibly mice, thus suggesting a possible new innate immunity pathway.
A combination of cellular, biochemical, genetic and genomic techniques have revealed a new molecular player in the production of fat cells in mice, which could improve our understanding of obesity.
The ability of epithelial cells to distinguish between domains on opposing cell surfaces within a tissue, a property known as planar cell polarity, relies on proteins and protein complexes directing the traffic of signaling proteins to specific locations on the cell surface membrane.
The intestine contains distinct subregions specialized for digestion along its anterior-posterior axis, and the stem cells that constantly renew these subregions are not interchangeable.
A structure of the complete, membrane bound, COPII coat solved by sub-tomogram averaging reveals the arrangement of all protein subunits on the membrane and suggests a mechanism for coating heterogeneously-shaped carriers.
Reduced energy expenditure in obesity may result from reduced sensitivity to sympathetic activation due to inflammation-generated signals in adipose tissue.
