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Volume 4 Issue 3, March 2002

Live budding yeast cells in which the nuclear position of a subtelomeric URA3 reporter is visualised by tetO/TetR-GFP (green). Chromatin is shown in purple. Cover design: Lawrence Keogh

Volume 4 Issue 3

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Article

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Brief Communication

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Erratum

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Editorial

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Letters to Editor

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Commentary

  • Cell signalling is essential for a plethora of inductive interactions during organogenesis. Surprisingly, only a few different classes of signalling molecules mediate many inductive interactions, and these molecules are used reiteratively during development. This raises the question of how generic signals can trigger tissue-specific responses. Recent studies in Drosophila melanogaster indicate that signalling molecules cooperate with selector genes to specify particular body parts and organ types. Selector and signalling inputs are integrated at the level of cis-regulatory elements, where direct binding of both selector proteins and signal transducers is required to activate tissue-specific enhancer elements of target genes. Such enhancers include autoregulatory enhancers of the selector genes themselves, which drive the refinement of expression patterns of selector genes.

    • Jennifer Curtiss
    • Georg Halder
    • Marek Mlodzik
    Commentary
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News & Views

  • The positioning of a gene within the nucleus is thought to help regulate its transcriptional state. An example is yeast telomeres, which have a propensity to cluster at the nuclear periphery and suppress subtelomeric genes. With a membrane anchoring technique, new data indicate that there may be a second class of perinuclear silencing sites, which require pore-associated myosin-like proteins to establish repression.

    • Florence Hediger
    • Susan M. Gasser
    News & Views

  • Mutations in either of two polycystin genes can cause kidney failure, but controversy remains regarding the cellular localization and function of the protein products. Polycystin-2 may be a calcium release channel located within the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), and yet may be physically linked to polycystin-1 in the surface membrane.

    • Michael D. Cahalan
    News & Views

  • The assembly of the DNA helicase at replication origins is crucial in initiating DNA synthesis. This process requires the conserved protein Cdt1. Here, a new study identifies a functional homologue of Cdt1 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The regulation of its activity reveals an alternative way to assemble prereplicative complexes (pre-RCs) and regulate origin function.

    • Domenico Maiorano
    • Marcel Méchali
    News & Views
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