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It’s another beautiful June day in London. The BT Tower is glinting against an unbroken cerulean sky, and the F1000 staff are busily publishing evaluation after evaluation (92,388 evaluations published at the time of writing). Here’s the latest batch that have caught my eye.

Group therapy

Rac1 is a GTPase that regulates the dynamics of the actin cytoskeleton in metazoa. Last year, a group at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, reported a version of Rac1 that can be activated by laser light. Essentially, a fragment of a plant photoreceptor kinase that changes structure in response to light is welded on, inhibiting Rac1 in the dark but allowing its activation when lit up. Now, using this probe in Drosophila, it’s shown that activation of Rac1 in single cells controls whole clusters of neighbouring cells.

Scissors jump

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

It’s not quite a vorpal blade, but the non-metal dependent nuclease BfiI behaves like one. It has a single active site but after the first cut the enzyme must flip itself over the DNA to make the second, during the same binding event, making it a truly acrobatic enzyme.

Unnatural born killers

Despite being less than enamoured with immunology, I love natural killer (NK) cells (and big, angry macrophages, too). I’m pleased, then, to see that just about any T cell, at any stage of development, can be turned into a NK cell at the flick of a transcription factor. These induced T-to-natural-killer (ITNK) cells, morphologically and genetically similar to conventional NK cells, can kill tumour cells in vitro and prevented metastases in mice.

How cool is that?

Papers referenced

• Making photoactivatable Rac1 10.1038/nature08241
• Group role of Rac1 10.1038/ncb2061
• Hard-working nuclease 10.1093/nar/gkp1194
• NK from T cells 10.1126/science.1188063

Note: All links to F1000 are free, so that you can read the evaluations without a subscription.