Last month we published an article outlining the benefits of interdisciplinary research (along with the accompanying challenges). As a prime example of this, numerous disciplines — from quantum mechanics, to ecology, to biochemistry — are involved in the study of the photosynthetic apparatus. In their article on page 971, Nathan Nelson and Adam Ben-Shem outline how structural studies have provided insights into the four membrane-protein complexes that are involved in converting sunlight into chemical energy.

With the excitement surrounding new technologies that have been developed on the basis of biological processes, the study of the intricacies of these processes often gets left behind. Long before the advent of RNA interference and related phenomena, double-stranded RNA and highly structured RNAs were known to function in diverse processes such as RNA maturation and localization. On page 1013, Bin Tian, Philip C. Bevilacqua, Amy Diegelman-Parente and Michael B. Mathews set out to familiarize us with structural features of the double-stranded-RNA-binding motif, its interaction with RNA, and the proteins to which it belongs. Among these are proteins that are responsible for the editing of viral RNAs, which makes such proteins important components of the antiviral response in higher organisms.

However, viruses employ a repertoire of strategies to subvert these host defences with the ultimate aim of ensuring their replicative success and, as Akrit Sodhi, Silvia Montaner and J. Silvio Gutkind describe (page 998), G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are widely exploited by viruses to achieve this end. This is hardly surprising, given the versatility of GPCRs in signal transduction. But understanding the virus-mediated routes to pathogenesis could, in turn, enable us to fight back with target-specific therapeutic strategies.