Epigenetic regulation is the new black, or at least charcoal. Modifying chromatin
Busman’s Holiday Faculty of 1000 published 1472 evaluations last month. This is a world record! And it should help you predict when we’re going to hit 90,000. Remember, we’re running a competition: simply twitter the date and time you think we’ll make 90,000 evaluations with the hashtag #F90K for a chance to win some F1000…
Three’s a crowd Who would have thought that plants could teach us about deafness? Or single-celled yeast about blood vessel development? Orthologous genes in different species can have totally different effects, and a statistical data-mining technique has thrown up not a few surprising models for human disease. The paper is free at PNAS and reviewed…
Everybody loves a good structure. Here’s one of the prototype foamy virus (PFV) integrase in complex with DNA ends. The integrase is the complex that binds the termini of viral DNA and catalyses its insertion into the host genome. Nasty piece of work, and incidentally one that has ‘nasty biophysical properties‘—at least the one from…
You turn me right round As an undergraduate, I remember being fascinated by the family of rotary motors that is the proton-translocating ATPase. This is the protein complex, resembling something from the imagination of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith rather than anything merely biological, that either pumps protons from one side of a membrane to another,…
It’s all in the mind Neuroscience is a fascinating subject, and not just because our friend Robert Sapolsky is a Faculty Member. Neuroscience (at least at F1000) covers a spectrum of subjects and disciplines, from the molecular basis of odour discrimination, through neural processing in the retina all the way up to anticipation of rewards…
Stem cells for dummies The ability to maintain embryonic stem cell lines—more importantly, to preserve their pluripotence—in culture held out great promise for the treatment of a range of conditions from cancer to Parkinson’s disease. Unfortunately the technology ran into trouble when in 2001 the US Government restricted Federal funding to work done with the…
