Journal Clubs

The lab of C. David Allis was among the pioneers of developing histone-PTM-specific antibodies to unlock the mysteries of chromatin.

Discovery of the wide conservation of the homeodomain provided revolutionary insight into gene function and ushered in the birth of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo).

Yonatan Stelzer highlights a landmark work from the lab of Howard Cedar that addresses how genome-wide DNA methylation patterns are established and instructed by the DNA sequence.

Marina Chekulaeva describes the experiments that showed that microRNAs cause degradation of their target mRNAs.

Liming Sun brings to attention paper by Li et al. (2012) reporting that necroptosis kinases, RIPK1 and RIPK3, form functional amyloids that regulate cell death signalling.

Leilei Chen describes the discovery that adenosine-to-inosine editing by ADAR1 marks endogenous double-stranded RNA as self, to prevent it from triggering innate immunity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Olivia Rissland recounts the findings of a paper that was seminal to our understanding of mRNA decay.

James Olzmann discusses the groundbreaking work of Ron Kopito and colleagues, which demonstrated that a CFTR mutant is ubiquitinated and degraded by the cytosolic 26S proteasome. This discovery contributed to our understanding of ERAD and had important implications for the development of therapeutic agents for cystic fibrosis.

Kate Meyer reminds us of a study of mRNA N⁶-methyladenosine that predated the epitranscriptomics era by decades.

Viegas and Figueiredo tell us how, among several molecular and biochemical discoveries, RNA trans-splicing was discovered in trypanosomes.

Heterochromatin DNA is heavily methylated yet also inaccessible. Olivier Mathieu describes the work that revealed how DNA methyltransferases access heterochromatin.