Volume 23 Issue 1, January 2021

Prostate cancer is difficult to treat because of molecular, cellular and clinical heterogeneity. Using single-cell RNA sequencing, a recent study reveals unexpected transcriptomic reprograming in immune cells and non-immune components of the tumour microenvironment, which may lead to viable therapeutic approaches against prostate cancer.

Nuclear dicing bodies were discovered in plants as subcellular droplets of a component of the Dicing complex, which is involved in microRNA production. Now they are revealed to be liquid–liquid phase-separated condensates with intrinsically disordered regions of the Dicing component SERRATE driving both phase separation and miRNA processing.

Amino acids are critical nutrients that contribute to metabolic and signalling pathways required to meet energy and biosynthetic demands in T cells. A new study now demonstrates that LCK can sense intracellular asparagine to support T cell receptor-mediated CD8⁺ T cell activation and effector responses to pathogens and tumours.

Assembling egg cells involves cytoplasmic and nuclear processes that together enable embryonic development. A study now defines a set of transcription factors required for cytoplasmic, but not key nuclear, processes.

Qi and colleagues review CRISPR-based epigenome engineering technologies to modulate histone and DNA modifications and to perturb DNA and RNA regulatory elements and chromatin organization.

Polarity cues regulate intestinal stem cell fate. Böttcher et al. demonstrate that mouse intestinal stem cells, which express the Wnt/planar cell polarity reporter Flattop, are primed either towards the enteroendocrine or Paneth cell lineage.

Xie et al. show that efficient miRNA biogenesis in Arabidopsis requires the assembly of pre-miRNA processing bodies mediated by SERRATE phase separation.

Maquat and colleagues report that nonsense-mediated mRNA decay is activated upon loss of the fragile X syndrome protein FMRP in patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells, which results in defects in neuronal differentiation.

Posfai, Schell, Janiszewski et al. assess candidate totipotent stem cells with in vitro and in vivo assays of increasing stringency to evaluate their developmental potential and lineage contributions.

Analysing the extra-embryonic mesoderm, Harland et al. show that Eomes influences chromatin accessibility at SCL-bound enhancers for erythropoiesis and enhancers that drive Runx1 expression in the haemogenic endothelium.

Wu et al. show that instead of altering cellular metabolism, asparagine directly binds to LCK and enhances T-cell-receptor signalling, thereby promoting CD8⁺ T-cell-mediated anti-tumour responses.

Chen et al. perform single-cell analysis and identify transcriptomic remodelling in epithelial cells, macrophages, T cells, fibroblasts and endothelial cells, which together regulate prostate cancer progression.

Gao et al. developed a CRISPR–Cas9-based system in which sgRNA production is controlled by the endogenous promoter to monitor the expression of weakly expressed genes and long non-coding RNAs in mammalian cells.