Volume 23 Issue 6, June 2021

The vascular system, plastic and positioned in the vicinity of tissues, is an undervalued regulator of adult stem cells. Two studies now show that the vascular-like Drosophila trachea is reshaped after intestinal damage or tumour formation and that this remodelling is required for compensatory intestinal stem cell proliferation and tumour growth.

COVID-19 has led to a global pandemic, but the long-term immunological effects of the infection are only partially understood. A new study now provides important new clues by describing the transcriptional and epigenetic processes behind the immune memory of both adaptive and innate immune cells in individuals who have recovered from COVID-19.

Transcription-coupled repair of DNA lesions takes place across all domains of life. A transcription-elongation factor, ELOF1, highly conserved in eukaryotes, has now been shown to play a key role in this process. Importantly, these findings also include evidence of a second transcription-coupled repair pathway in mammalian cells.

In this Perspective, Fuxreiter and Vendruscolo discuss the fundamental nature of the droplet and amyloid states of proteins, the regulatory mechanisms controlling their formation, and the cellular functions associated with these condensed states.

Two side-by-side papers report that the transcription elongation factor ELOF1 drives transcription-coupled repair and prevents replication stress.

Two side-by-side papers report that the transcription elongation factor ELOF1 drives transcription-coupled repair and prevents replication stress.

You et al. report single-cell ATAC-seq profiles of periphery immune cells from patients recovered from COVID-19, which reveals a global remodelling of the chromatin accessibility that may contribute to immune memory formation.

Using an unbiased and quantitative proteomic approach, Kugeratski et al. identified the core constituents of exosomes and found that syntenin-1 was the most abundant component, making it a putative universal biomarker.

Li et al. develop reversible shearing DNA-based tension probes to quantify molecular piconewton-scale forces, estimate the number of mechanically active receptors with single-molecule sensitivity and study mechanisms of force transduction in live cells.

Truong et al. developed a cell-based reporter system, EXSISERS, that enables non-invasive quantification of the protein expression levels of exon-specific isoforms via intein-mediated protein splicing.

Xue and colleagues developed LACE-seq to globally profile RNA targets of RNA-binding proteins at single-nucleotide resolution in low-input cells or even single oocytes.