Articles in 2022

Elizabeth Chen looks back on the work by Beatrice Mintz and Wilber Baker (1967) that settled the debate on the origin of multinucleation in skeletal muscle cells.

Oded Rechavi advocates for alternative means of assessing academic careers to evaluation letters.

Julia Bailey-Serres highlights early work on the molecular mechanisms of plant stress responses, indicating that selective translation is a key driver of plant resilience to acute stresses.

Leclair and Anczuków describe how high-throughput screens uncovered the connection between poison exons and cancer.

Chiara Zurzolo brings to attention the pioneering work that established virus-infected cells as a model to study cell polarity.

Cheng, Mittnenzweig et al. demonstrate the cellular role of the major DNA demethylation machinery, ten-eleven translocation (TET) dioxygenases, in early mammalian development.

Actin cytoskeleton underlies key cellular processes, such as membrane dynamics and cell migration. Despite years of research, how cells regulate actin filament assembly and disassembly to establish dynamic actin structures that fulfil these functions remains an exciting area of study.

The generation of membrane curvature is essential for the formation of membrane tubules, sheets and vesicles, and hence, underlies membrane trafficking events. Various protein-based mechanisms function in membrane bending, and these appear to be organized in time and space by protein coats, including clathrin, caveolar coat complex, and COPI and COPII coats.

Rashmi Sasidharan highlights the work by Musgrave et al. (1972) demonstrating that ethylene drives shoot elongation in plants submerged in water, allowing the plant to outgrow the floodwaters.

Kirova et al. demonstrate that reactive oxygen species signals are integrated into cell cycle control through a direct interaction with cyclin-dependent kinase 2.

Stem cell function declines during ageing, resulting in the loss of tissue integrity and health deterioration. Ageing is associated with defects in the maintenance of stem cell quiescence and cell differentiation ability, clonal expansion and infiltration of immune cells in the niche. This Review discusses the mechanisms underlying ageing in stem cells and their niches, and potential rejuvenation strategies.

Marta Shahbazi recounts the work by Lewis and Rossant (1982) that pioneered research on size regulation in mammalian embryos.

Luciano Marcon discusses the revolutionary work by Alan Turing proposing that embryogenesis could be entirely a self-organizing process.

Sladitschek-Martens show that reduced activity of key cellular mechanosensors, transcription co-activators YAP/TAZ, is an important driver of ageing of stromal and contractile cells, leading to cell senescence.

Mitochondrial respiratory function needs to adapt to the energetic demands of the cell. These adaptive responses encompass transcriptional, translational and post-translational mechanisms that together enable regulation of respiratory chain assembly and mitochondrial membrane remodelling to fine-tune energy generation in accordance with intracellular and extracellular cues.

Elvan Böke recounts the pioneering work of Arthur T. Hertig on the ultrastructure of human oocytes.

Zhang et al. show that in fungal and plant cells CO₂ sensing involves liquid–liquid phase separation of PP2C phosphatases.

Alternative cleavage and polyadenylation (APA) generates mRNA isoforms with alternative 3′ untranslated regions; these isoforms modulate protein abundance and functionality, including through subcellular localization of mRNA and translation. APA is modulated by signalling pathways that control co-transcriptional and post-transcriptional processes, and its dysregulation affects cell responses to environmental changes.

Hiroshide Saito discusses two seminal papers that provided foundational evidence for the hypothesis that RNA with both genetic information and catalytic activity had an essential role in the origin of life.

Kempson and colleagues suggest that existing imaging assays do not quantitatively represent double-strand DNA breaks, and urge the development of more accurate assays.