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The shoot meristem gives rise to new organs throughout a plant’s life by the activity of pluripotent stem cells in the meristem center. Organ initiation at the periphery of the shoot meristem is triggered by t...
Malaria is a common and life-threatening disease endemic in large parts of the world. The emergence of antimalarial drug resistance is threatening disease-control measures that depend heavily on treatment of c...
Mutations in the proteins that bind insulator DNA elements that define the boundaries of chromatin domains can give morphogenetic readouts in Drosophila, as recently reported in BMC Biology by Bonchuk et al. in t...
In contrast to mammals, the zebrafish has the remarkable capacity to regenerate its pancreatic beta cells very efficiently. Understanding the mechanisms of regeneration in the zebrafish and the differences wit...
The opportunistic pathogen Candida glabrata is a member of the Saccharomycetaceae yeasts. Like its close relative Saccharomyces cerevisiae, it underwent a whole-genome duplication followed by an extensive loss of...
Virus B is a newly emerged viral strain for which there is no current treatment. Drug A was identified as a potential treatment for infection with virus B. In this pre-clinical phase of drug testing, the effec...
Cajal’s careful observations of the anatomy of the nervous system led him to some lesser-known predictions about the function of glia as mediators of sleep. Reporting over 120 years later in BMC Biology, Bellesi ...
Astrocytes can mediate neurovascular coupling, modulate neuronal excitability, and promote synaptic maturation and remodeling. All these functions are likely to be modulated by the sleep/wake cycle, because br...
For faithful chromosome segregation during cell division, correct attachments must be established between sister chromosomes and microtubules from opposite spindle poles through kinetochores (chromosome bi-ori...
Tim Hunt took an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1964, and his PhD and subsequent work focussed on the control of protein synthesis until 1982, when his adventitious discovery of the c...
Insulators play a central role in gene regulation, chromosomal architecture and genome function in higher eukaryotes. To learn more about how insulators carry out their diverse functions, we have begun an anal...
Shear stress in arteries, which is a measure of the force exerted by blood flow on the arterial wall, is associated with the location of lipid plaques that cause heart disease. In this study, a mathematical mo...
Some steroid drugs are designed for clinical use to combat muscle-wasting diseases, but are also used by athletes to improve their performance by increasing muscle strength or endurance. This study investigate...
Probiotic treatments are thought to increase the levels of commensal bacterial species that populate the human gut, causing no harm to their host and playing an important role in maintaining gut health. This s...
Peptide transporters are membrane proteins that mediate the cellular uptake of di- and tripeptides, and of peptidomimetic drugs such as β-lactam antibiotics, antiviral drugs and antineoplastic agents. In spite...
Adult body size is controlled by the mechanisms that stop growth when a species-characteristic size has been reached. The mechanisms by which size is sensed and by which this information is transduced to the g...
The functional consequences of whole genome duplications in vertebrate evolution are not fully understood. It remains unclear, for instance, why paralogues were retained in some gene families but extensively l...
Mitogen activated protein kinases (MAPK) play an essential role in integrating extra-cellular signals and intra-cellular cues to allow cells to grow, adapt to stresses, or undergo apoptosis. Budding yeast serv...
The cytoplasmic RIG-like receptors are responsible for the early detection of viruses and other intracellular microbes by activating the innate immune response mediated by type I interferons (IFNs). RIG-I and ...
The male germline transcriptome changes dramatically during the mitosis-to-meiosis transition to activate late spermatogenesis genes and to transiently suppress genes commonly expressed in somatic lineages and...
Qualitative and quantitative measurements of motor performance are essential for characterizing perturbations of motor systems. Although several methods exist for analyzing specific motor tasks, few behavioral...
Malaria invasion of red blood cells involves multiple parasite-specific targets that are easily accessible to inhibitory compounds, making it an attractive target for antimalarial development. However, no curr...
Stem cells are thought to play a critical role in minimizing the accumulation of mutations, but it is not clear which strategies they follow to fulfill that performance objective. Slow cycling of stem cells pr...
Development and evaluation of new insect pest management tools is critical for overcoming over-reliance upon, and growing resistance to, synthetic, biological and plant-expressed insecticides. For transgenic c...
Genetic ablation of target cells is a powerful tool to study the origins and functions of cells, tissue regeneration, or pathophysiology in a human disease model in vivo. Several methods for selective cell ablati...
Mechanotransduction - how cells sense physical forces and translate them into biochemical and biological responses - is a vibrant and rapidly-progressing field, and is important for a broad range of biological...
In this essay we illustrate some general principles of mathematical modeling in biology by our experiences in studying the molecular regulatory network underlying eukaryotic cell division. We discuss how and w...
Plants are able to sense UV-B through the UV-B photoreceptor UVR8. UV-B photon absorption by a UVR8 homodimer leads to UVR8 monomerization and interaction with the downstream signaling factor COP1. This then i...
The maintenance of genetic variation through sexually antagonistic selection is controversial, partly because specific sexually-antagonistic alleles have not been identified. The Drosophila DDT resistance allele ...
In many insect species, fitness trade-offs exist between maximizing body size and developmental speed. Understanding how various species evolve different life history strategies requires knowledge of the physi...
Daily rhythms in mammals are programmed by a master clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The SCN contains two main compartments (shell and core), but the role of each region in system-level coordination...
Adenomatous polyposis coli (Apc) is a tumor suppressor that inhibits Wnt/Ctnnb1. Mutations of Apc will not only lead to familial adenomatous polyposis with associated epithelial lesions, but will also cause aggre...
We report here the first genome-wide high-resolution polymorphism resource for non-human primate (NHP) association and linkage studies, constructed for the Caribbean-origin vervet monkey, or African green monk...
Gene regulation in biological systems is impacted by the cellular and genetic context-dependent effects of the biological parts which comprise the circuit. Here, we have sought to elucidate the limitations of ...
The early stages of ovarian follicle formation—beginning with the breakdown of germ cell cysts and continuing with the formation of primordial follicles and transition to primary and secondary follicles—are cr...
Transposable elements are mobile DNA sequences that are widely distributed in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes, where they represent a major force in genome evolution. However, transposable elements have rar...
Chromosomes reorganize in early meiotic prophase to form the so-called telomere bouquet. In fission yeast, telomeres localize to the nuclear periphery via interaction of the telomeric protein Rap1 with the mem...
Most organisms, especially photoautotrophs, alter their behaviours in response to day–night alternations adaptively because of their great reliance on light. Upon light-to-dark transition, dramatic and univers...
Nuclear myosin 1c (NM1) is emerging as a regulator of transcription and chromatin organization.
The Correction to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2019 17:32
Secondary, phased small interfering RNAs (phasiRNAs) derived from protein-coding or noncoding loci (PHAS) are emerging as a new type of regulators of gene expression in plants. However, the evolution and function...
Alternative splicing is primarily controlled by the activity of splicing factors and by the elongation of the RNA polymerase II (RNAPII). Recent experiments have suggested a new complex network of splicing reg...
Photoreceptor degeneration is a main hallmark of many blinding diseases making protection of photoreceptors crucial to prevent vision loss. Thus, regulation of endogenous neuroprotective factors may be key for...
The digestive systems of animals can become highly specialized in response to their exploration and occupation of new ecological niches. Although studies on different animals have revealed commonalities in gut...
Jasmonates are well known plant signaling components required for stress responses and development. A prominent feature of jasmonate biosynthesis or signaling mutants is the loss of fertility. In contrast to t...
Collectin-K1 (CL-K1, or CL-11) is a multifunctional Ca2+-dependent lectin with roles in innate immunity, apoptosis and embryogenesis. It binds to carbohydrates on pathogens to activate the lectin pathway of compl...
Recent genome-wide association studies have uncovered genomic loci that underlie an increased risk for atrial fibrillation, the major cardiac arrhythmia in humans. The most significant locus is located in a ge...
Myc proteins are essential regulators of animal growth during normal development, and their deregulation is one of the main driving factors of human malignancies. They function as transcription factors that (i...
Fixation of beneficial genes in bacteria and archaea (collectively, prokaryotes) is often believed to erase pre-existing genomic diversity through the hitchhiking effect, a phenomenon known as genome-wide sele...
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