While antimicrobial cocktails are highly effective for defence against pathogenic microbes, the innate immune response may instead employ highly specific peptidic antibiotics to combat certain natural enemies.
Investigation of synapse development using a single neuron system illuminates how individual neurons specify connectivity with their postsynaptic partners and the central role of the synaptic organizer neurexin in this process.
STAG1 has been identified as a hardwired genetic dependency of cancer cells harbouring mutations in the cohesin subunit and emerging major tumor suppressor STAG2 holds the promise for the development of selective therapeutics.
Evolutionary adaptation to a constitutive perturbation of DNA replication reveals that adaptive mutations in three conserved pathways interact to restore faithful chromosome replication and segregation.
Zfp106 functions as an RNA binding protein, binds directly to GGGGCC RNA repeats, is required in motor neurons to prevent ALS-like neurodegeneration in mice, and can suppress neurotoxicity in an established fly model of ALS.
Orphan ATM kinase-domain missense mutations are unexpectedly common and form a potent oncogenic event and a biomarker for Topo-isomerase I inhibitor based therapy.
A mathematical model that combines stochasticity and spatial structure describes the dynamics of the viral population during an infection cycle, and fitting the model to RNA and virus abundances over time shows that poliovirus follows a geometric replication mode.
Ribosomes undergo an unanticipated movement (‘sliding’) while translating homopolymeric A sequences, which provides a biochemical rationale for the observation that iterated AAA codons are under-represented in gene-coding sequences.
