April 19, 2021
Image credit: Chiyoda et al., pgen.1009457
04/19/2021
Research Article
King et al. find that a subfamily of Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome Proteins consisting of JMY and WHAMM is critical for a rapid pathway for cell death. Specifically, JMY-mediated actin assembly in the cytoplasm is necessary for its pro-apoptotic function.
Image credit: Virginia L. King
Current Issue May 2021
04/22/2021
Research Article
Finseth et al. study the wildflower Mimulus guttatus and show that both inter-specific and intra-population differences in CenH3A affect centromeric drive in hybrids, and that adaptive evolution of CenH3A has followed the recent and costly spread of the driver in a wild population. Their results results demonstrate an active co-evolutionary arms race between DNA and protein components of the meiotic machinery in Mimulus.
Image credit: Finseth et al., pgen.1009418
04/16/2021
Research Article
Yoshida and Kitano build a probabilistic model of karyotype evolution based on the “karyograph”, which treats karyotype evolution as a walk on the two-dimensional space representing the chromosome and arm numbers. They apply the model to two large taxonomic groups of fish, and a small plant group.
Image credit: Yoshida and Kitano, pgen.1009502
04/15/2021
Research Article
Park et al. show that SAMHD1 resolves R-loops induced by transcription-replication conflicts, thereby functioning as a tumor suppressor and contributing to the maintenance of genome stability. SAMHD1 may be a reliable biomarker in anti-cancer therapeutics.
Image credit: Park et al., pgen.1009523
04/08/2021
Research Article
Choi et al. show that spermatozoa in gene-edited mice lacking a BTBD18 targeted pachytene piRNA cluster on Chr18 have severe sperm head dysmorphology, poor motility, impaired acrosome exocytosis, zona pellucida penetration and are sterile. They reveal a central role of pachytene piRNAs in controlling spermiogenesis and male fertility.
Image credit: Choi et al., pgen.1009485
04/15/2021
Research Article
Ingles-Prieto et al. use optogenetics to deliver cell type-specific pro-survival signals and efficiently suppress disease phenotypes in Drosophila and human cells. This work has the potential to inspire novel strategies towards a spatio-temporal regulation of tissue repair.
Image credit: Vanessa Zheden, Alvaro Ingles-Prieto and Harald Janovjak
05/20/2021
Review
Hivert et al. present the Falconer ShinyApp, a user-friendly web tool that shows how the combination of gene action and allele frequencies at causal loci translate to genetic variance and genetic variance components for a complex trait.
Image credit: Darwin Laganzon, Pixabay
05/13/2021
Review
Alan Herbert reviews the role of MDA5 helicase in inducing Z-RNA formation by Alu inverted repeat elements as well as the less characterized roles of other helicases in modulating innate immune responses.
Image credit: Alan Herbert, pgen.1009513
04/22/2021
Viewpoints
Nielsen et al. comment on two recent studies that have taken advantage of MAVE technology to investigate loss-of-function variants in MSH2, which cause the cancer-predisposing Lynch Syndrome.
Image credit: Nielsen et al., pgen.1009496
04/22/2021
Perspective
Chang and Malik highlight a new study (pgen.1009418) showing an active co-evolutionary arms race between DNA and protein components of the meiotic machinery in Mimulus, with consequences for individual fitness and molecular divergence.
Image credit: Finseth et al., pgen.1009418
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