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Volume 32 Issue 2, October 2002

Cover art by: Sam Maitin Referred by Larry A. Donoso (of Wills Eye Hospital, Philadelphia)

Volume 32 Issue 2

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Editorial

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News & Views

  • Excessive exposure to visible light damages the vertebrate retina. New work demonstrates that two different pathways, a bright-light pathway and a low-light dependent pathway, mediate light-induced retinal death. Although both pathways are initiated by excessive activation of the photopigment rhodopsin, they differ in that only the bright-light pathway is AP-1-dependent and only the low-light pathway is dependent on phototransduction.

    • Samuel G. Jacobson
    • Roderick R. McInnes
    News & Views

  • Bacteria can communicate with members of their own species and others to coordinate their behavior in response to cell density. This phenomenon, known as quorum sensing, relies on the production and sensing of one or more secreted signal molecules. A recent study identifies a complex quorum sensing network in the human pathogen Vibrio cholerae.

    • Miguel Cámara
    • Andrea Hardman
    • Debra Milton
    News & Views

  • Orofacial clefts (cleft lip and/or palate) are among the most common birth defects in humans, affecting up to 1 in 500 infants at birth. The cause of the most common syndromic clefting condition, Van der Woude syndrome, has now been identified as haploinsufficiency of the gene encoding interferon regulatory factor 6 (IRF6). Furthermore, dominant-negative mutations of IRF6 lead to webbing of the skin in popliteal pterygium syndrome, demonstrating beyond doubt that these syndromes are allelic.

    • Maximilian Muenke
    News & Views

  • There is a growing awareness of the importance of chromatin modifications in regulating everything from gene expression to DNA replication. A new study extends our knowledge of how certain regions of the yeast genome are silenced into transcriptionally inactive domains, and offers strong evidence for new structural principles that may govern this process. These findings require us to revise our histone tail–centric view of chromatin silencing and other processes that affect chromatin structure.

    • Karolin Luger
    News & Views

  • Securin has biological functions in both cellular transformation and sister chromatid separation. A new study shows that it also interacts with p53 and regulates p53-mediated transcription and apoptosis.

    • Anil K. Rustgi
    News & Views
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