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Volume 4 Issue 6, June 2008

A potent small-molecule inhibitor of Cdc7. In a high-throughput screen, Montagnoli et al. (p 357) identified an ATP-competitive inhibitor of Cdc7, a kinase involved in initiating DNA replication. Using this inhibitor, the authors demonstrated that Cdc7 inhibition decreases the firing of replication origins and halts DNA synthesis. In rodents, the Cdc7 inhibitor had antitumor activity, which suggests that Cdc7 is a potential target for anticancer therapeutics (see also News and Views by Jackson on p 331). Shown is an immunofluorescence image of a xenograft tumor with the Cdc7 substrate pSer40/41 Mcm2 stained in red and nuclei in blue. Cover art by Erin Boyle based on images provided by Veronica Patton and Rachele Alzani.

Volume 4 Issue 6

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Editorial

  • Correspondence in scientific journals is an essential mechanism for mediating scientific debates, but emerging online technologies offer new ways to foster scientific communication.

    Editorial

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Obituary

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Commentary

  • For the last 30 years, the production of affinity reagents and particularly antibodies for research and therapeutic applications has been dominated by hybridoma and polyclonal technologies, while more modern, reliable and inexpensive approaches have lagged. Here we discuss why this is the case and how a cultural shift in the biomedical research community could bring the new technologies for creating antibodies and other tailor-designed binding proteins into the mainstream, with the potential for myriad new applications in research and medicine.

    • Stephen W Michnick
    • Sachdev S Sidhu
    Commentary
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Book Review

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News & Views

  • A new pharmacological inhibitor of the Cdc7 protein kinase can block replication initiation without activating the replication checkpoint, thus validating replication initiation as a new target class for cancer cell chemotherapy.

    • Peter K Jackson
    News & Views

  • Lysine methyltransferases are well-known regulators of transcription through their methylation of histone lysine residues. Now high-throughput peptide arrays reveal non-histone substrates of G9a/KMT3C, which was previously known as a euchromatic histone H3K9-specific methyltransferase.

    • Patrick Trojer
    • Danny Reinberg
    News & Views

  • The search for new antimalarial strategies takes a step forward with the discovery of a small parasitocidal molecule that inhibits a calcium-dependent protein kinase and may thereby interfere with parasite motility.

    • Christian D Doerig
    News & Views

  • Crosstalk between histone modifications plays an important role in transcriptional regulation. In a recent study, an elegant chemical synthesis approach has been used to study the intricate relationship between two modifications associated with active transcription.

    • Nara Lee
    • Yi Zhang
    News & Views

  • Biosynthesis of essential hormones is often complex and redundant. Two independent genetic screens have converged to support a previously conjectured auxin biosynthetic pathway that is responsible for providing auxin during plant development and in response to environmental cues.

    • Lucia C Strader
    • Bonnie Bartel
    News & Views
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Brief Communication

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Article

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