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Insulin-producing beta cells emerge during pancreas development in two sequential waves. Recently described later-forming beta cells in zebrafish show high similarity to second wave mammalian beta cells in dev...
In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the essential small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) protease Ulp1 is responsible for both removing SUMO/Smt3 from specific target proteins and for processing precursor SUMO i...
The focal adhesion protein p130Cas (Cas) activates multiple intracellular signaling pathways upon integrin or growth factor receptor ligation. Full-length Cas frequently promotes cell survival and migration, w...
Current interest in proteasome inhibitors for cancer therapy has stimulated considerable research efforts to identify the molecular pathway to their cytotoxicity with a view to identifying the mechanisms of se...
This review discusses the many roles atomistic computer simulations of macromolecular (for example, protein) receptors and their associated small-molecule ligands can play in drug discovery, including the iden...
The uptake of drugs into cells has traditionally been considered to be predominantly via passive diffusion through the bilayer portion of the cell membrane. The recent recognition that drug uptake is mostly ca...
The elevated metabolic requirements of cancer cells reflect their rapid growth and proliferation and are met through mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes that reprogram cellular processes. For exa...
Rule-based modeling has become a powerful approach for modeling intracellular networks, which are characterized by rich molecular diversity. Truly comprehensive models of cell behavior, however, must address s...
Transposable elements are best interpreted as genomic parasites, proliferating in genomes through their over-replication relative to the rest of the genome. A new study examining correlations across Drosophila sp...
The axon initial segment (AIS) plays a crucial role: it is the site where neurons initiate their electrical outputs. Its composition in terms of voltage-gated sodium (Nav) and voltage-gated potassium (Kv) chan...
It had been long assumed that almost all insertions of mobile DNA elements occurred during germ-cell development rather than in somatic-cell development, but solid evidence for transposition in somatic cells i...
Genetic studies in Drosophila melanogaster reveal an important role for Myc in controlling growth. Similar studies have also shown how components of the insulin and target of rapamycin (TOR) pathways are key regu...
The mitochondrial genome of higher plants is unusually dynamic, with recombination and nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) activities producing variability in size and organization. Plant mitochondrial DNA also g...
The mitochondrial genome of plants is-in every respect and for yet unclear reasons-very different from the well-studied one of animals. Thanks to next-generation sequencing technologies, Davila et al. precisely c...
The caspase family, which plays a central role in apoptosis in metazoans, has undergone an expansion in amphioxus, increasing to 45 members through domain recombination and shuffling.
The combination of molecular sequence data and bioinformatics has revolutionized phylogenetic inference over the past decade, vastly increasing the scope of the evolutionary trees that we are able to infer. A ...
Building the complex vertebrate nervous system involves the regulated production of neurons and glia while maintaining a progenitor cell population. Neurogenesis starts asynchronously in different regions of t...
Cells are highly complex and orderly machines, with defined shapes and a startling variety of internal organizations. Complex geometry is a feature of both free-living unicellular organisms and cells inside mu...
Fungal sexual reproductive modes have markedly high diversity and plasticity, and asexual species have been hypothesized to arise frequently from sexual fungal species. A recent study on the red yeasts provide...
Enormous molecular sequence data have been accumulated over the past several years and are still exponentially growing with the use of faster and cheaper sequencing techniques. There is high and widespread int...
Cell migration is essential during development and in human disease progression including cancer. Most cell migration studies concentrate on known or predicted components of migration pathways.
Peptide Recognition Domains (PRDs) are commonly found in signaling proteins. They mediate protein-protein interactions by recognizing and binding short motifs in their ligands. Although a great deal is known a...
Many previous studies have focused on understanding how midbrain dopamine neurons, which are implicated in many neurological conditions, are generated during embryogenesis. One of the remaining questions conce...
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) are being increasingly recognized as important regulators of gene expression. A recent paper in Genome Biology reports the identification of a lncRNA family in Plasmodium falciparum,...
The preimplantation embryo is sensitive to culture conditions in vitro and poor maternal diet in vivo. Such environmental perturbations can have long-lasting detrimental consequences for offspring health and phys...
Ire1 is a signal transduction protein in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane that serves to adjust the protein-folding capacity of the ER according to the needs of the cell. Ire1 signals, in a transcriptio...
The unfolded protein response (UPR) controls the protein folding capacity of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Central to this signaling pathway is the ER-resident bifunctional transmembrane kinase/endoribonucle...
Brains increase the survival value of organisms by being robust and fault tolerant. That is, brain circuits continue to operate as the organism needs, even when the circuit properties are significantly perturb...
Cytolytic cells of the immune system destroy pathogen-infected cells by polarised exocytosis of secretory lysosomes containing the pore-forming protein perforin. Precise delivery of this lethal hit is essentia...
Understanding how biodiversity is shaped through time is a fundamental question in biology. Even though tropical rain forests (TRF) represent the most diverse terrestrial biomes on the planet, the timing, loca...
Forming synaptic connections of the appropriate strength between specific neurons is crucial for constructing neural circuits to control behavior. A recent paper in Neural Development describes the use of a synap...
There are many reasons to be interested in stem cells, one of the most prominent being their potential use in finding better drugs to treat human disease. This article focuses on how this may be implemented. R...
Stem cells are the target of mutations that can lead to life threatening diseases. However, stem cell populations tend to be small and therefore clonal expansion of mutant cells is highly sensitive to stochast...
Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved lysosomal degradation route for soluble components of the cytosol and organelles. There is great interest in identifying compounds that modulate autophagy because they ...
Autophagy mediates lysosomal degradation of cytosolic components. Recent work has associated autophagic dysfunction with pathologies, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. To date, the identification of...
Stable isotope tracing is a powerful technique for following the fate of individual atoms through metabolic pathways. Measuring isotopic enrichment in metabolites provides quantitative insights into the biosyn...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2012 10:74
GINS is an essential eukaryotic DNA replication factor that is found in a simplified form in Archaea. A new study in this issue of BMC Biology reveals the first structure of the archaeal GINS complex. The structu...
Simply hearing the song produced by another bird of the same species triggers the regulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) in high-order auditory parts of the zebra finch brain. Some of the identified miRNAs appear to...
Microarrays first made the analysis of the transcriptome possible, and have produced much important information. Today, however, researchers are increasingly turning to direct high-throughput sequencing - RNA-...
The proteasome is a multi-subunit protein machine that is the final destination for cellular proteins that have been marked for degradation via an ubiquitin (Ub) chain appendage. These ubiquitylated proteins e...
Gq is a heterotrimeric G protein that plays an important role in numerous physiological processes. To delineate the molecular mechanisms and kinetics of signalling through this protein, its activation should b...
DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1) has been shown to be phosphorylated on multiple serine and threonine residues, based on cell type and physiological conditions. Although recent studies have suggested that prote...
The X chromosome has fewer testis-specific genes than autosomes in many species. This bias is commonly attributed to X inactivation in spermatogenesis but a recent paper in BMC Biology provides evidence against X...
Paucity of male-biased genes on the Drosophila X chromosome is a well-established phenomenon, thought to be specifically linked to the role of these genes in reproduction and/or their expression in the meiotic ma...
Erythropoietin (EPO) and its receptor (EPOR) are expressed in the developing brain and their transcription is upregulated in adult neurons and glia upon injury or neurodegeneration. We have shown neuroprotecti...
Hox genes modify serial homology patterns in many organisms, exemplified in vertebrates by modification of the axial skeleton and in arthropods by diversification of the body segments. Butterfly wing eyespots ...
Metalloproteins are essential for many cellular functions, but it has not been clear how they distinguish between the different metals to bind the correct ones. A report in BMC Biology finds that preferences of t...
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