Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
We discuss editorial policies that aim to facilitate transparency and reproducibility, and their impact on the research content published in Nature Cell Biology.
Multipolar spindles are a feature of cancer cells often associated with chromosomal aberrations. In the final Review in our Series on Genomic Instability, Logarinho and Maiato discuss how multipolar spindles form, with an emphasis on the role of the loss of spindle pole integrity in this process.
Using in vitro reconstitution systems, three studies shed light on the interactions of Atg8 family proteins with cargo receptors and components of the basal autophagy machinery. The results have important mechanistic implications for selective macroautophagy, scaffold formation and spatio-temporal organization of the lipidation process during autophagosome formation.
Heterogeneity in tumour cell properties underlies many treatment failures. Understanding the sources of such heterogeneity has proved to be challenging, but remains critical to improving patient outcomes. Integrin αvβ3 expression in multiple types of solid tumour stem cells is now shown to control a pro-survival pathway that contributes to therapy resistance.
Connexins localize to the plasma membrane, where they form gap junctions between cells. Cuervo and colleagues report that connexins associate with autophagosome precursor structures in the plasma membrane and inhibit autophagosome biogenesis. Nutrient deprivation relieves this inhibition and promotes autophagic degradation of connexin proteins.
The E2-like enzyme Atg3 conjugates phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) to Atg8 to facilitate its membrane association and promote autophagosome maturation. Melia and colleagues report that Atg3 preferentially associates in vitro with highly curved, PE-enriched membranes, such as the isolation membrane of a nascent autophagosome, thus ensuring access to a local supply of PE.
The Cvt pathway in yeast operates constitutively, but the mechanism by which non-cargo material is excluded from the vacuole is incompletely defined. Martens and colleagues show that cargo binding to the cargo receptor Atg19 exposes further Atg8 binding sites on the receptor, which draws the isolation membrane around the autophagic cargo and prevents inclusion of non-cargo material in autophagosomes.
The surface area of neurons increases rapidly during neurite extension. Galli and colleagues show that the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-resident SNARE protein Sec22b bridges the ER and plasma membrane during this process and contributes to plasma membrane expansion, but does not promote membrane fusion.
Fox and colleagues report that phosphorylation of profilin-1 in endothelial cells induces HIF-1α activation, leading to tumour angiogenesis in glioblastoma.
Cheresh and colleagues delineate a pathway that regulates tumour cell stemness and resistance to therapy. They find that the unliganded integrin αvβ3 is able to promote cancer cell self-renewal, tumour initiation and resistance to EGFR inhibitors by binding KRAS and RalB to activate the NF-κB pathway.
Beachy and colleagues use a chemical carcinogenesis mouse model of bladder cancer to demonstrate that an Shh-expressing basal urothelial stem cell is the cell of origin of invasive bladder carcinoma, and to analyse the progression of these lesions.
The dynein microtubule motor drives the motility of cilia and flagella, but exactly how dynein power strokes are generated is unclear. Using cryo-electron tomography to study intact flagella, Nicastro and colleagues provide structural insights into the power-stroke cycle.
