Awardees' Articles
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Makoto Hayashi and colleagues
Monday 14th May 2012
Cells that arrest cell division during mitosis eventually die or stop the cell cycle in the following G1 phase. Both of these outcomes are proposed to be tumor suppressive mechanisms, since escape from prolonged mitotic arrest may render cells aneuploid. Despite its importance in tumor suppression, the molecular pathway that predisposes arrested mitotic cells to die or stop the cell cycle in the subsequent G1 phase had not been determined.Here, we found that the chromosome ends (i.e. telomeres),...
HFSP Young Investigator Grant holder Narendra Maheshri and colleagues
Thursday 26th April 2012
How a gene responds to a transcription factor (TF) can depend on the number of binding sites within that TF's target promoter. But what if there are additional binding sites somewhere else in the genome? Using both experiments and models we demonstrate that these sites can qualitatively change the dose-response of the gene in a manner that depends quantitatively on the number of sites. Many organisms' genomes contain large regions of repetitive DNA sequence of variable length. A less appreciated...
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Patrick Müller and Program Grant holders Alexander Schier and Sharad Ramanathan and colleagues
Wednesday 25th April 2012
Six decades ago Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science, proposed a mathematical model to explain pattern formation during development. In our recently published paper in Science, we find biophysical support for Turing's model - the activator Nodal moves more slowly through the embryo than its inhibitor Lefty.
HFSP Program Grant holders David Sumpter and Madeleine Beekman and colleagues
Tuesday 24th April 2012
Honey bee colonies are able to adjust and reallocate their foraging resources efficiently when foraging conditions in their environment change. This is achieved by two mechanisms: in the short term, bees who had previously foraged at a food source make occasional return visits to that food source and resume foraging if its quality improves; in the long term, foraging bees use the waggle dance to transmit information about the quality and location of newly found food sources to their colony mates...
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Gabriel Rosenblum and colleagues
Tuesday 17th April 2012
Site-specific labeling of ribosomes and tRNAs allows mechanistic investigation of translation using single-molecule approaches. However, quality control of labeled components can be a laborious and cumbersome process. Here we develop a novel assay that allows straightforward determination of the activity of fluorescently labeled translational components. This assay follows translation in real-time, using cell-free expression of a GFP variant. The activity of fluorescently labeled ribosomes and tRNAs...
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Shimon Bershtein and colleagues
Thursday 12th April 2012
Most random mutations are destabilizing, and they affect fitness by compromising structural integrity of proteins that results in decreased activity and toxicity due to aggregation. Surprisingly, destabilizing mutations can also induce oligomerization, thus preserving proteins' solubility and function.
HFSP Long-Term Fellows Ralph Neumüller and Frederik Wirtz-Peitz and colleagues
Thursday 12th April 2012
Protein trap lines in various organisms have mainly been used to study the expression pattern of the tagged gene products. In addition to this approach we show that protein trap lines can effectively be used to perform high stringency loss of function experiments and to probe the interactome of the tagged protein, significantly expanding the experimental versatility of existing protein trap lines.
HFSP Program Grant holders Daniel Wolpert and Michael Shadlen and colleagues
Thursday 22nd March 2012
Introspection leads us to believe that we make decisions and then act upon them, but a recent study shows that the human motor system begins to prepare for action during decision-making as the brain deliberates over the evidence.
HFSP Long-Term Fellows Gidi Shemer and Bob Goldstein and colleagues
Monday 19th March 2012
Apical constriction is a major mechanism in driving cell shape changes during key developmental events, including gastrulation, formation of the basic germ layers, as well as neural tube closure in vertebrates. Apical constriction is thought to be triggered by contraction of a cytoskeletal network, composed of actin filaments and myosin motor proteins (actomyosin). Here, we show that actomyosin contraction takes place even before cell shape changes are initiated, and that cell shape changes are...
HFSP Young Investigator Grant holders Julie Plastino and Laurent Kreplak and colleagues
Monday 19th March 2012
The actin cytoskeleton is the cellular scaffolding that primarily determines the shape and mechanical properties of cell protrusions. We examined the combined effect of two key actin-binding proteins, fascin and VASP, on the mechanical properties of actin comets, test-tube mimics of cell protrusions. We find that the effect of the two molecules together is more than the sum of the individual effects, indicating synergy between the two proteins for increased actin network rigidity.
