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All living things must be able to sense and respond to signals in their environment in order to grow and survive. For bacteria, a common means through which this occurs is via two-component signaling systems, which are ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short RNAs that, in complex with Argonaute (AGO) proteins, guide repression of mRNA targets. miRNAs negatively regulate most mammalian mRNAs, and disruption of this regulation often results in severe ...

Aneuploidy is a state of genome imbalance which alters the copy number of whole chromosomes. While aneuploidy is rare in healthy tissues, it is one of the most common features of cancerous tumors. Studies of aneuploid yeast ...

Transcriptional regulation of gene expression plays critical roles in the control of cell identity, development, and disease. Genome organization contributes to transcriptional regulation in multiple ways. At a fundamental ...

Eukaryotic DNA replication is a fundamental process that must occur accurately and only once per cell cycle. To ensure that origins only initiate once per cell cycle, the events of DNA replication initiation are temporally ...

Conjugative elements are mobile genetic elements that can transfer from a donor bacterium to a recipient via an element-encoded type IV secretion system. Integrative and conjugative elements (ICEs) are an abundant class ...

To generate haploid gametes, meiotic cells must undergo two consecutive rounds of chromosome segregation without an intervening gap phase. Importantly, because homologous chromosomes are segregated in meiosis I, but sister ...

Neuronal activity generates DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) in the brain. Topoisomerase IIb (TOP2B), important for relieving transcription-associated DNA supercoiling, was implicated as the source of these neuronal ...

Cancer cells are characterized by a broad spectrum of unique genetic, epigenetic and transcriptional states, which are often concomitant with high degrees of plasticity in cell identity. These cell states and the fluidity ...

The human body is colonized by trillions of microbes, many of which reside in a layer of mucus that covers all wet epithelia in the body. In this way, mucus serves as the first line of defense to the host, simultaneously ...