Awardees' Articles
HFSP Career Development Award holder Patrick Müller and colleagues
Thursday 23rd May 2013
How do the molecules that regulate embryo development end up in the right place at the right time? We examined several current theories and suggest that diffusion-based mechanisms are the most commonly used during development.
HFSP Long-Term Fellow César Nombela-Arrieta and colleagues
Monday 13th May 2013
Hematopoietic stem cells reside in specific bone marrow niches, which are thought to be low in oxygen content. We employed advanced quantitative imaging techniques to comprehensively analyze the spatial distribution of stem and progenitor cells in the bone marrow, describe their interaction with distinct types of blood vessels, and determine that their characteristic hypoxic status is not dictated by localization in specific regions but is rather physiologically inherent to the hematopoietic stem...
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Bastien Boussau and colleagues
Tuesday 30th April 2013
Genomes are often analyzed in a historical, evolutionary framework. To establish this framework, we have developed a new method that reconstructs both gene trees and species trees with high accuracy.
HFSP Program Grant holders Maxime Dahan, Yohanns Bellaiche and Jacob Piehler and colleagues
Thursday 25th April 2013
Cellular functions like migration or division rely on the orchestration of different signaling networks both in time and in the intracellular space. While many tools have been developed over the years to observe these activities within the cell, only a few are able to create local and controlled biochemical activities inside cells. We have designed such a technique, based on magnetic nanoparticles, allowing the activation of signaling networks at the subcellular scale with an unprecedented spatiotemporal...
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Alphée Michelot and colleagues
Monday 15th April 2013
Cells often have partially redundant mechanisms to perform cellular functions, which can be an obstacle in deciphering molecular functions in a single mutant background. In this study, we were interested in determining how yeast cells control the elongation of actin filaments in endocytic actin networks and we successfully identified three partially overlapping mechanisms.
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Joseph Marsh and colleagues
Thursday 11th April 2013
The assembly of proteins into complexes underlies a wide variety of biological processes. By combining mass spectrometry experiments with large-scale analyses of protein structure, protein interaction and genome sequence data, we found that protein complexes have experienced evolutionary selection to assemble via well-defined, ordered pathways.
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Franz Hagn and colleagues
Thursday 4th April 2013
Structural studies of membrane proteins are still hampered by difficulties in finding appropriate membrane mimicking media that maintain protein structure and function. A novel membrane system, called phospholipid nanodiscs, consisting of a patch of lipids surrounded by two copies of a lipid-binding protein, recently became popular in the membrane protein field. In this system, membrane proteins can be investigated in a real detergent-free and native-like lipid environment. Smaller nanodiscs tailored...
HFSP Young Investigator Grant holders Kevin Dorfman, Pietro Cicuta, Bianca Sclavi and Marco Cosentino Lagomarsino and colleagues
Thursday 28th March 2013
Much like people, individuals in a population of bacteria respond differently to their environment. The experimental apparatus developed in this work allows HFSP-funded researchers to examine these responses under controlled chemical and nutrient conditions.
HFSP Long-Term Fellow Michael Meinecke and colleagues
Wednesday 27th March 2013
Clathrin-mediated endocytosis is a highly orchestrated process which involves over 40 proteins, many of which are transiently recruited to the plasma membrane. A bottom up approach to reconstitute cooperative membrane binding and membrane scission of proteins involved in the process was used to study this poorly understood problem.
Review by HFSP Long-Term Fellow Yun-Chi Tang and colleagues
Tuesday 26th March 2013
To ensure the species-specific karyotype is faithfully maintained thus upholding health and reproduction, numerous mechanisms have evolved to guarantee the integrity of genomic information. When errors happen, for instance from cell cycle checkpoint failures, the resulting DNA copy-number alterations can become detrimental, often identified as the cause of multiple diseases and developmental abnormalities in an organism. On the other hand, DNA copy-number alterations can contribute to enhancing...
