News & Comment

Translation reprogramming in plants in response to innate-immunity induction relies on a novel cap-independent translation pathway.

Elizabeth Chen looks back on the work by Beatrice Mintz and Wilber Baker (1967) that settled the debate on the origin of multinucleation in skeletal muscle cells.

Oded Rechavi advocates for alternative means of assessing academic careers to evaluation letters.

Julia Bailey-Serres highlights early work on the molecular mechanisms of plant stress responses, indicating that selective translation is a key driver of plant resilience to acute stresses.

Leclair and Anczuków describe how high-throughput screens uncovered the connection between poison exons and cancer.

Chiara Zurzolo brings to attention the pioneering work that established virus-infected cells as a model to study cell polarity.

Cheng, Mittnenzweig et al. demonstrate the cellular role of the major DNA demethylation machinery, ten-eleven translocation (TET) dioxygenases, in early mammalian development.

Rashmi Sasidharan highlights the work by Musgrave et al. (1972) demonstrating that ethylene drives shoot elongation in plants submerged in water, allowing the plant to outgrow the floodwaters.

Kirova et al. demonstrate that reactive oxygen species signals are integrated into cell cycle control through a direct interaction with cyclin-dependent kinase 2.

Marta Shahbazi recounts the work by Lewis and Rossant (1982) that pioneered research on size regulation in mammalian embryos.

Luciano Marcon discusses the revolutionary work by Alan Turing proposing that embryogenesis could be entirely a self-organizing process.

Sladitschek-Martens show that reduced activity of key cellular mechanosensors, transcription co-activators YAP/TAZ, is an important driver of ageing of stromal and contractile cells, leading to cell senescence.

Elvan Böke recounts the pioneering work of Arthur T. Hertig on the ultrastructure of human oocytes.

Zhang et al. show that in fungal and plant cells CO₂ sensing involves liquid–liquid phase separation of PP2C phosphatases.

Hiroshide Saito discusses two seminal papers that provided foundational evidence for the hypothesis that RNA with both genetic information and catalytic activity had an essential role in the origin of life.

Kempson and colleagues suggest that existing imaging assays do not quantitatively represent double-strand DNA breaks, and urge the development of more accurate assays.

Olivia Rissland recounts the findings of a paper that was seminal to our understanding of mRNA decay.

In the face of the current climate crisis, Martin Farley highlights the importance of making research more sustainable.

The non-coding RNA 7S inhibits transcription initiation in mitochondria by preventing the RNA polymerase from interacting with promoter DNA and transcription factors.

Rensvold et al. provide a resource to characterize the function of mitochondrial proteins and to facilitate the discovery of disease-relevant mutations.