Volume 23 Issue 2, February 2021

Anorexia commonly develops in patients with advanced cancer and is closely associated with cachexia. A new study shows that anorexia emerges earlier than cachexia in both Drosophila and mouse tumour models and that tumour-derived humoral factors induce anorexia by systemically dysregulating neuropeptides in the brain.

Engineered, light-inducible artificial myosin motors enable selective and direct manipulation of filopodial extensions and provide refined tools to control intracellular cargo transport in vivo.

Karoutas and Akhtar review the roles of the nuclear lamina in chromatin-related functions, including transcription, epigenetic regulation and chromatin architecture, and their abnormalities in diseases and ageing.

Recasens-Alvarez et al. model human ribosomopathies and find that apoptosis and cellular stress result from proteotoxic stress that overwhelms the degradation machinery.

Baumgartner et al. identify proteotoxic stress as the underlying cause of the loser status in a cell competition model caused by reduced autophagic, proteasomal flux and accumulation of protein aggregates.

Hakala et al. report that twinfilin dissociates capping proteins from the actin filament barbed ends to promote actin turnover at leading-edge lamellipodia.

Verma et al. report that ALC1 loss confers PARP inhibitor hypersensitivity in homologous recombination-deficient cells through reducing chromatin accessibility.

Yeom et al. demonstrate that tumour cell-secreted Dilp8/INSL3 activates Lgr3 signalling and modulates expression of distinct feeding hormones such as NUCB1 and sNPF, thereby inducing anorexia in cancer.

Chumduri, Gurumurthy et al. show that cervical squamous and columnar epithelia derive from two stem cell populations, regulated by opposing Wnt signals, and that a Wnt-repressive environment can induce metaplasia.

Zhang et al. design optogenetically controlled artificial transport vehicles that can be activated reversibly to manipulate cargo transport, impede neurite development and functionally characterize filopodial networks in axolotls.