Volume 19 Issue 4, April 2018

The decondensed, permissive chromatin state of pluripotent stem cells is sensitive to translation, creating a positive feedback loop whereby hypertranscription depends on the high output of translation it produces.

Developmental enhancers can function in an additive manner and are regulated by RNA polymerase II pausing and by the directionality of transcription.

Fatty acid oxidation and increased acetyl-CoA levels act to suppress endothelial–mesenchymal transition.

Oncogenes induce firing of replication origins at transcribed genes; this promotes transcription–replication conflicts and genome instability.

Myosin VI is recruited to ubiquitylated mitochondria and drives their encapsulation into actin cages to sequester them for mitophagy.

Philip Cohen highlights how two studies from the laboratory of Zhijian Chen, published in 2000 and 2001, started a new era in the study of signal transduction pathways and the roles of ubiquitin chains.

Cells produce a wide variety of extracellular vesicles (subdivided into exosomes and microvesicles), which carry a multitude of cargoes, including proteins, lipids and nucleic acids. These vesicles have emerged as important means of cell–cell communication in physiology and disease, and their use in the clinic is now being explored.

The assembly and maintenance of heterochromatin are carried out by distinct mechanisms that include factors that bind nascent transcripts to recruit chromatin-modifying enzymes. The resulting post-translational modifications on heterochromatic histones contribute to the regulation of development by restricting lineage-specific gene expression.

Gene expression programmes that are induced by inflammatory or oncogenic signals are controlled by shared chromatin regulators. Such chromatin dependencies are known to regulate oncogenes and inflammation-promoting genes and can be leveraged to combine and increase the effectiveness of immune-cell-based therapies with epigenetic therapies.

The evolutionarily conserved mediator of RNA polymerase II transcription (Mediator) complex is a general regulator of transcription. Recent structural and functional studies have provided important insights into the mechanisms of transcription activation by Mediator and have also revealed a new function of this complex in genome organization and suggested that it could be therapeutically targeted in disease.