Journal Clubs

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.

Transposons and their host genomes are entangled in an evolutionary arms race, recounts Tuğçe Aktaş.

Ting and Lee describe how the trypanosome base J ‘inspired’ the discovery of the mechanism of active DNA demethylation.

Keren Lasker discusses early work of Lucy Shapiro, which provided first evidence that bacterial cells spatially regulate their cellular processes, akin to their eukaryotic counterparts.

Valeria Levi recounts how a clever way to visualize the function of H⁺-ATP synthase pioneered single-molecule technologies.

‘Alpha helix’ was not Linus Pauling’s first choice of a name for the protein structural motif. Egli and Zhang recount what the original name was, why it was changed and what is between the alpha helix and the DNA double helix.

Mike Henne discusses the pioneering work of Jean Vance, which revealed that mitochonodria-associated membranes (MAMs) are sites for inter-organelle phospholipid exchange and step-wise synthesis reactions.

Prior to introduction of the first DNA–protein structure, Ned Seeman et al. correctly conceived how proteins recognize specific sequences in double-helix nucleic acids.

Appreciation of intrinsically disordered regions of proteins is not a novel phenomenon: Frixione and Ruiz-Zamarripa recollect that they were discussed already in the mid-twentieth century.