Hippo and the wounded heart

Is ignorance bliss for some bacterial cells? Single-cell analysis of the archetypical switch from glucose to lactose as a carbon source in E. coli, by Thomas Julou, Erik van Nimwegen and co-authors, shows that bacteria can exhibit stochastic bimodal responses to external stimuli because the corresponding sensory circuit is so lowly expressed that some cells are effectively blind to the stimulus.

Highly divergent sites in multiple sequence alignments can negatively impact phylogenetic inference; trimming methods aim to remove these, but recent analysis suggests this can make things worse. Jacob Steenwyk, Antonis Rokas and colleagues introduce ClipKIT, a trimming method that instead aims to retain parsimony-informative sites; making phylogenies with ClipKIT-trimmed alignments is accurate, robust and time-saving.

Kai Mao, Peter Breen and Gary Ruvkun show that surveillance of mitochondrial dysfunction in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans triggers the activation of an RNA interference pathway to mediate antiviral defense, in a manner homologous to the mammalian RIG-I helicase viral response pathway.