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Volume 11 Issue 4, April 2004

Green tea contains a polyphenol called EGCG that has protective effects against cancer. Tachibana and colleagues show that the anticancer activity of EGCG is mediated by the laminin receptor on the cell surface. Shown on the cover is a tea plantation in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia (image kindly provided by Oliver Oberdorf; http://oberdorf.org). pp 380-381.

Volume 11 Issue 4

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Editorial

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Commentary

  • Two camps continue to evolve in the field of structural biology—a 'systems-oriented' camp, which studies proteins or complexes carefully one system at a time, and a 'discovery-oriented' one, which studies proteins of entire families, pathways or genomes. The end goals of both camps are the same: to decipher the atomic-resolution structures and mechanisms of biological macromolecules and understand them in the context of the living cell.

    • Raymond C Stevens
    Commentary

  • Structural genomics efforts are already producing a quarter of all 'new' macromolecular structures (<30% sequence identity to previously solved structures) and are stimulating development of systematic and automated approaches to structure determination. The thousands of new structures likely to be determined and the technologies and infrastructure likely to be developed over the next decade will benefit all biologists.

    • Thomas C Terwilliger
    Commentary
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News & Views

  • Like certain protein kinases, some protein acetyltransferases such as p300 may use an inhibitory loop that can be regulated to limit the accessibility of substrates to its active site. The finding that autoacetylation of this loop activates the acetyltransferase provides the first evidence for an acetylation cascade analogous to protein kinase cascades.

    • B Franklin Pugh
    News & Views

  • A novel natural ribozyme has been discovered in the 5′ noncoding region of the glmS mRNA. Surprisingly, glmS ribozyme activity is modulated by a cellular metabolite. The glmS ribozyme thus represents the first example of an novel regulatory mechanism in bacteria.

    • Scott M Knudsen
    • Andrew D Ellington
    News & Views

  • Two structural studies of the La lupus antigen reveal that the La motif adopts a winged-helix fold at the N terminus and associates with the central RNA-recognition motif to form a binding surface for precursor transcripts synthesized by RNA polymerase III.

    • Daniel J Kenan
    • Jack D Keene
    News & Views

  • A new study reports the hUpf2-hUpf3b interaction domain structure and provides the first structural insight into the core of the nonsense-mediated decay pathway. Surprisingly, the RNA-recognition motif of hUpf3b, a domain typically involved in RNA binding, constitutes instead an interaction surface for hUpf2.

    • Jens Lykke-Andersen
    News & Views
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