RNA sequencing of the African clawed frog has identified hundreds of putative direct Six1 and Eya1 target genes, including transcriptional regulators of neuronal progenitors and neuronal/sensory differentiation.
Cocktail-party listening performance in normal-hearing listeners is associated with the ability to focus attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors.
Luisa CS Antunes, Daniel Poppleton ... Simonetta Gribaldo
Phylogenomics provides support for the Gram-positive type of bacterial cell envelope being a derived character that arose independently multiple times through loss of an ancestral outer membrane.
Building on previous work (Booth et al, 2014), we show how two mitotic phosphatases are formed, how they are regulated by opposing kinases during the cell cycle and reveal a novel opportunity for the development of cancer therapeutics.
Serotonergic cells innervating the Drosophila antennal lobe are inhibited by odors and modulate olfactory responses in conjunction with the entire serotonergic network.
Aaron L Randolph, Younes Mokrab ... Ian Scott Ramsey
Electrophysiological and computational techniques provide a structural basis for understanding the conformational changes that are required to activate Hv1 proton channels.
Bayly S Wheeler, Erika Anderson ... Barbara J Meyer
A chromosome-wide mechanism balances X-linked gene expression between the sexes in C. elegans, but no similar chromosome-wide mechanism balances gene expression between X chromosomes and autosomes.
Jacob LS Bellmund, Lorena Deuker ... Christian F Doeller
Functional magnetic resonance imaging performed while people imagined directions from stationary viewpoints supports theories suggesting that spatially tuned cells such as grid cells underlie mental simulation for future thinking.
The overall energy conversion efficiency is calculated for a bacterial vesicle that harvests solar energy for ATP production on the basis of an atomic-detail structural model.
Seipin oligomers dynamically interact with small, nascent lipid droplets near the endoplasmic reticulum to convert them into larger, mature lipid droplets in a newly identified step of lipid droplet formation.
Matthew J Shurtleff, Morayma M Temoche-Diaz ... Randy Schekman
A cell-free reaction that reconstitutes the selective sorting of a miRNA into exosomes reveals an RNA-binding protein, YBX1, as a critical sorting factor.
Yilin Kang, Michael James Baker ... Diana Stojanovski
A novel and metazoan-specific protein, Tim29, is identified as a subunit of the human TIM22 complex and shown to function in the assembly of hTim22 and facilitate contacts with the TOM complex.
Integrating human embryonic transcriptomes from 15 sites during organogenesis identifies novel expression signatures linked to congenital disorders and a new programme of non-coding gene expression.
Alessandro Papale, Ilaria Maria Morella ... Stefania Fasano
Two cell-penetrating peptides that inhibit Ras-ERK signalling and a potent clinically relevant MEK inhibitor block cocaine conditioned place preference and accelerate extinction of cocaine self-administration upon a single administration in mice.
Janelle MP Pakan, Scott C Lowe ... Nathalie L Rochefort
The three main types of inhibitory neurons in mouse primary visual cortex respond differently to locomotion in darkness and during visual stimulation, revealing context-dependent responses to changes in behavioral state.
The brain continues to represent individual fingers in primary somatosensory cortex decades after the amputation of a hand, indicating that cortical maps do not require ongoing sensory input from the body.
Neural networks like the crustacean cardiac ganglion employ multi-faceted compensatory mechanisms to achieve the stability and robustness that are critical to long-term function.
The spiking activity of the subthalamic nucleus, rather than the activity of striatal projection neurons, orchestrates basal ganglia downstream activity and output commands in health and Parkinson’s disease.
Min-Kyung Sung, Tanya R Porras-Yakushi ... Raymond J Deshaies
Tom1 is the ubiquitin ligase in yeast that anchors a protein quality control pathway that rapidly eliminates ribosomal proteins that fail to assemble into ribosomes.
The loss of neuronal connectivity in a brain region called the hippocampus significantly contributes to the cognitive impairments associated with sleep deprivation.
Amrita Rai, Anastasia Oprisko ... Matthias P Müller
A human three-helix Rab-binding domain can potentially bind to two Rab proteins simultaneously with different affinities at binding sites generated by gene duplication.
Alessandro Bitto, Takashi K Ito ... Matt Kaeberlein
Three months treatment with the drug rapamycin increases lifespan, alters cancer prevalence, remodels the microbiome, and improves functional measures of health in middle aged mice in a dose- and sex-dependent manner.
Kisspeptin neurons in the hypothalamus release peptide and amino acid neurotransmitters that work together to coordinate the activity of gonadotropin-releasing hormone neurons and subsequent release of reproductive hormones.
Existing artificial retinas produce distorted and imprecise activation of the visual system, but reverse engineering promises to refine the induced activation patterns.
Thomas S Churcher, Natalie Lissenden ... Hilary Ranson
Mosquitoes with high levels of pyrethroid resistance reduce the ability of bednets to protect those using them and the wider community, which is predicted to substantially increase malaria cases.
A spatially-tuned normalization model accounts for neuronal responses to attended or unattended stimuli that are presented inside the classical receptive field or the surround, and explains various other observations.
A screen of tens of thousands of vesicle traffic networks in silico shows that Golgi-like cisternal maturation is a natural outcome of vesicle traffic homeostasis.
Jason Seth Rothman, Laszlo Kocsis ... Robin Angus Silver
Hydrodynamic and steric interactions slow vesicle mobility and are predicted to ultimately limit vesicle supply to the active zone during sustained high-frequency signalling at a central synapse.
Jonathan G Van Vranken, Mi-Young Jeong ... Jared Rutter
The essential function of ACP is not related to mitochondrial fatty acid and lipoic acid synthesis, but rather an evolutionarily-conserved role in iron sulfur cluster biogenesis.
Shekhar Srivastava, Saswati Panda ... Edward Y Skolnik
The mammalian potassium channel KCa3.1, which is important for T- and B-cell activation, is inhibited by cytoplasmic copper, mediated by a histidine residue (His358) that is phosphorylated to activate the channel.
A new technique for biodistribution and targeted uptake studies of nanoparticle imaging agents is demonstrated and used to achieve levels of detail that are inaccessible through existing methods.
The compactness of synaptic release sites coupled with their four-fold number in humans compared to rats provides unprecedented scaleability in operation of human synapses.
The exon junction complex regulates the cell polarity determinant Discs large 1, which acts independently from its role in cell polarity to protect Dishevelled protein from lysosomal degradation in Wingless/Wnt signaling.
Cell biological, biochemical and structural studies reveal the mechanistic roles of two new mitochondrial iron-sulfur protein assembly factors, explaining the patho-biochemical defects of affected patients.
Mitochondrial proteins Nfu1 and BolA3 mediate the transfer of preformed [4Fe-4S] clusters within the mitochondria to recipient proteins to shield clusters from oxidative damage during transfer.
Auxiliary proteins play functional roles in modulating the assembly and activity of a non-canonical ABC transporter that is important for the maintenance of outer membrane lipid asymmetry.
Encapsulin-associated ferritin proteins form metal-dependent decamers that are active as ferroxidase enzymes, but require encapsulation to form an iron store.
Robbyn L Weaver, Jazeel F Limzerwala ... Jan M van Deursen
Strengthening of spindle assembly checkpoint activity and attachment error correction through BubR1 manipulation preserves genomic integrity and protects against tumor formation.
Adi Bercovich-Kinori, Julie Tai ... Noam Stern-Ginossar
During host shut-off caused by the Influenza A virus, cellular genes that play important housekeeping roles for the virus are still efficiently translated.
Clive P Morgan, Jocelyn F Krey ... Peter G Barr-Gillespie
A new purification method for stereocilia membranes enables efficient immunoaffinity purification of rare protein complexes from hair cell stereocilia, including the newly described complex of deafness genes PDZD7 and MYO7A.
Christopher A Baker, Yishai M Elyada ... M McLean Bolton
Combining spatial restriction of channelrhodopsin to the neuronal cell body with two photon excitation and calcium imaging will enable production of high resolution maps of neural circuitry.
The organisation of the Drosophila embryo into segmental units is orchestrated by combinatorial regulatory interactions between spatially patterned and temporally patterned transcription factors.
Two sets of modular components are sufficient to rewire MAPKs to regulate proteins through ubiquitination – a complementary pair of protein interaction domains and a phosphodegron.
Rebekah Elizabeth Mahoney, Jorge Azpurua, Benjamin A Eaton
By regulating protein translation within the neuron, insulin signaling can control neuronal activity by altering the release of neurotransmitter molecules.
Uniting two principles that have been thought of being mutually exclusive in the past can explain how neurons become sensitive to the direction of motion.
A conserved alternative splicing program is specific to planarian stem cells and is controlled by the highly conserved splicing factors CELF and MBNL; therefore, this mode of regulating stem cells is likely ancestral to all animals.
HIV co-infection does not affect Mycobacterium tuberculosis mutation rates and does not drive the emergence of antimicrobial resistance within patients in the largest outbreak of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in Latin America to date.
A newly discovered membrane structure associates with one of the centrioles and affects two important centrosomal events in epidermal cells – ciliary positioning and spindle orientation – through a physical interaction.
Minoru Koyama, Francesca Minale ... Joseph R Fetcho
Competition between neurons on the left and right sides of the brain drives the decision to turn left versus right in zebrafish, and potentially all vertebrates.
A newly identified component in the architecture of the axon/myelin-unit – the septin/anillin scaffold – maintains the structure of myelin in the central nervous system, thereby preventing myelin outfoldings.
Andre Voelzmann, Pilar Okenve-Ramos ... Natalia Sanchez-Soriano
A novel regulatory cascade downstream of Tau and spectraplakins ensures that synaptic proteins are delivered to axonal terminals in the developing and ageing brain, providing potential explanations for precocious synapse loss in dementias.
Loïs S Miraucourt, Jennifer Tsui ... Edward S Ruthazer
Endocannabinoid activation of the CB1 receptor on retinal ganglion cells in the eye results in enhanced excitability and responsiveness to visual stimulation through a novel mechanism involving intracellular chloride regulation.
Mutations affecting a nuclear encoded metalloprotease cause of a new form of mitochondriopathy, highlighting the importance of this protease for mitochondrial function in humans.
Zhaofeng Gao, Andrea A Putnam ... Eckhard Jankowsky
Ded1p and eIF4A, two RNA helicases that function in eukaryotic translation initiation, interact physically with each other and with the scaffolding protein eIF4G.
The concepts that oxidative muscle fibres cannot be large and that satellite cell number is the major determinant for effective regeneration are fundamentally challenged.
F Esra Demircioglu, Brian A Sosa ... Thomas U Schwartz
High resolution structures of the essential human AAA+ ATPase TorsinA and its disease mutant in complex with an activator reveal details of the interaction that will guide drug design and further functional characterization.
Computations based on detailed atomic models explain how the ATP-driven sodium-potassium pump avoids transporting the wrong type of ions in order to maintain the physiological concentration of sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane.
C David Wood, Hildegonda Veenstra ... Michelle J West
Epstein-Barr virus controls B-cell growth and survival through large-scale reorganization of the enhancers of the MYC and BCL2L11 genes, and may promote MYC translocations as a result.
A neural gating mechanism in the external cuneate nucleus of the rat brain is engaged during wake movements and disengaged during sleep-related twitches.
Kevin Q Shan, Evgueniy V Lubenov ... Athanassios G Siapas
Recordings in freely-moving rats show that hippocampal dorsal CA1 pyramidal cells signal only spatial information, even in a non-spatial task such as trace eyeblink conditioning.
Rahul Chadda, Venkatramanan Krishnamani ... Janice L Robertson
Measuring the equilibrium dimerization of a polytopic membrane protein in lipid bilayers forms the basis of a new system for studying the physical forces that stabilize membrane protein association in membranes.
A group of innate-like lymphocytes surveys the lymph node subcapsular sinus for bacterial and fungal invaders using a novel combination of chemoattractant and adhesion molecules.
Crystal structures of Nanos bound to Pumilio and target RNAs demonstrate how Nanos forms a molecular clamp to alter Pumilio RNA regulation and specificity in embryonic development and germline maintenance.
Despite their extreme morphologies, snakes display a global regulatory strategy of their Hox genes similar to that implemented by mammals with, however, important modifications in enhancer specificity.
Models that generate tandem alignments of cell polarities are more readily compatible with the formation of PIN1 polarity patterns in plant leaf buds than the most widely accepted “up-the-gradient” model.
