Journal Clubs

In this Journal Club, Audrey Williams and Sally Horne-Badovinac highlight the importance of studying the basal cell surface and its dynamics to understand epithelial cell behaviours and tissue rearrangements.

Lluís Ribas de Pouplana outlines the unanswered questions of mitochondrial transcription.

Xavier Trepat highlights the first approach to measurement of forces exerted by cells

Dan Mishmar recounts the first studies that used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to trace the origin of humanity to Africa and that connected mtDNA mutations with a human disease.

Hong Zhang highlights the emerging importance of lipid transfer proteins in autophagosome biogenesis.

Marianne Farnebo describes how the application of microscopy techniques has provided valuable information on repeats RNAs.

Emil Heitz was a pioneer of epigenetics at a time when the nature of the heredity material was still unclear.

Early in his career, Gordon Carmichael was inspired by the contradictory conclusions of three articles.

Miguel Beato describes his Eureka moment after reading that ATP is a nuclear hydrotrope.

Arnaud Echard discusses two studies that uncovered a key role for the ESCRT machinery in cytokinesis.

Henrik Jönsson discusses the mathematical model for hormone movement through plant tissues that Graeme Mitchison proposed in 1980, and how models can inspire new research.

Susana Godinho discusses a 1996 paper by Heald et al. on the organization of microtubules into bipolar spindles.

Jesús Gil discusses the first evidence for cellular senescence being associated with ageing, and how these studies opened new routes for basic and translational research.

Channing Der and Kirsten Bryant discuss recent work leading towards therapeutic targeting of autophagy in pancreatic cancer.

Jan Philipp Junker discusses new insights into mechanisms of transcriptional compensation in mutants.

David Barford discusses how the template model for MAD2 activation in the spindle assembly checkpoint represented a new concept for generating and propagating intracellular signals.

Adriano Aguzzi discusses the endeavours of the Gitler team to identify the causes underlying the fatal human neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The introduction of DNA-chain terminators for sequencing by Fred Sanger enabled the early genome sequencing projects.

Ueli Schibler explains why the phenotype of a mutation in a codon of the ‘21st amino acid’ selenium cysteine was unexpectedly specific.

Rebecca Taylor discusses the elegance and importance of early discoveries from the Walter laboratory on the unfolded protein response, and why they have become landmark studies.