This month’s Nature Genetics has an article introduced with the catchy title Aging and cancer: killing two birds with one worm. That’s referring to using C. elegans as a model organism, of course, due to its utility as a model organism for genetic research. Pinkston-Gosse and Kenyon follow a C. elegans-ortholog of FOXO transcription factors, [...]

Three papers from UC Davis have appeared on the PLoS journals in the past few days that bring together population genetics and genomic sequencing to address questions of importance to evolutionary biology. Their discussions of divergence in coding versus non-coding, and adaptive versus neutral shifts, are what caught my eye. Collectively, they’re three very densely [...]

….statistics. The very word strikes fear into the heart of many a biologist (including me). In an article published earlier this year, Cumming and co-workers of La Trobe University, Melbourne gave a very useful rundown of common mistakes made when using statistical error bars in biology and suggested a number of rules that should be [...]

Gene regulatory network (GRN) circuits are collections of DNA segments in a cell which interact with each other (indirectly through their RNA and protein expression products) and with other substances in the cell, thereby governing the rates at which genes in the network are transcribed into mRNA. A lot of research has gone into (a) [...]

Eukaryotic cells possess a surveillance mechanisms that identifies aberrantly processed mRNA precursors and prevents their flow to the cytoplasm by tethering them near the site of transcription. Termed post-translational modification, this process includes the distinct events of 5′ capping, 3′ polyadenylation, and intron splicing. During processing, nascent mRNA assembles together with RNA binding proteins into [...]

Site-specific recombinases have, for the past 20 years, been one of the most powerful tools in studying the functions of all sorts of genes. Most widely used as the Cre/lox-based system for inserting or deleting genes in mice, transgenic analyses have told us volumes about animal development1. For instance, mouse genetic knockouts are routinely the [...]

Ubiquitin is a small protein, which can be attached to other cellular proteins – a post-translational modification called ubiquitination. Discoveries in the ’80s illuminated ubiquitin as a label for degradation and recycling of the modified protein. Recent studies however, are suggesting more nuanced roles for ubiquitin in signal transduction and cellular function.

Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of migration of any kind is, how do you know which way to point yourself? Heck, this isn’t just about migration, it’s about how something is oriented in its immediate environment. For orientation, there’s magnetic North, gravity, or any conceivable cue that you might choose to face towards. How do [...]

Nature Precedings represents a step forward for disseminating experimental results in the internet age. Especially ‘negative’ results, that might not have gotten published otherwise, but is extremely helpful to other researchers in trying to avoid making the same mistakes. Refutation of a hypothesis, while not a discovery, is the goal of the well-planned experiment in [...]

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) defines the issue of Open Access Publication as: An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions: 1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display [...]