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.
The development of colonies of cells in choanoflagellates, water-dwelling organisms that feed on bacteria, is triggered by the presence of very low concentrations of a lipid molecule produced by certain types of bacteria.
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 genome-organizing protein that is present only in the olfactory system of mice has been found to orchestrate changes in the relative numbers of different odor-sensing neurons on the basis of how active these neurons are.
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.
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 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.
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.
