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The neurobiology of parenting: A neural circuit perspective. In article number 1600159 Kohl et al. discuss how modern approaches in neurobiology allow us to deconstruct the neural circuits underlying parental care, a key social behavior. The cover depicts a schematized mammalian brain surrounded by images of fluorescently labeled neurons, at different spatial scales, that form these circuits. Maternal...
Eukaryotic genomes are functionally organized into chromatin, a compact packaging of nucleoproteins with the basic repeating unit known as the nucleosome. A major focus for the chromatin field has been understanding what rules govern nucleosome positioning throughout the genome, and here we review recent findings using a novel, sequence‐targeted remodeling enzyme. Nucleosomes are often packed into...
We propose that the essential function of the most highly conserved protein in bacterial cytokinesis, FtsZ, is not to generate a mechanical force to drive cell division. Rather, we suggest that FtsZ acts as a signal‐processing hub to coordinate cell wall synthesis at the division septum with a diverse array of cellular processes, ensuring that the cell divides smoothly at the correct time and place,...
Host‐pathogen arms race is a universal, central aspect of the evolution of life. Most organisms evolved several distinct yet interacting strategies of anti‐pathogen defense including resistance to parasite invasion, innate and adaptive immunity, and programmed cell death (PCD). The PCD is the means of last resort, a suicidal response to infection that is activated when resistance and immunity fail...
DNA demethylation can occur passively by “dilution” of methylation marks by DNA replication, or actively and independently of DNA replication. Direct conversion of 5‐methylcytosine (5mC) to cytosine (C), as originally proposed, does not occur. Instead, active DNA methylation involves oxidation of the methylated base by ten‐eleven translocations (TETs), or deamination of the methylated or a nearby...
The sterile worker castes found in the colonies of social insects are often cited as archetypal examples of altruism in nature. The challenge is to explain why losing the ability to mate has evolved as a superior strategy for transmitting genes into future generations. We propose that two conditions are necessary for the evolution of sterility: completely overlapping generations and monogamy. A review...
Recent studies at the nanometer scale have revealed that relatively uniform clusters of adhesion proteins (50–100 nm) constitute the modular units of cell adhesion sites in both cell‐matrix and cell‐cell adhesions. Super resolution microscopy and membrane protein diffusion studies both suggest that even large focal adhesions are formed of 100 nm clusters that are loosely aggregated. Clusters of 20–50...
Eukaryotic ribosomes are assembled from their components, the ribosomal RNAs and ribosomal proteins, in a tremendously complex, multi‐step process, which primarily takes place in the nuclear compartment. Therefore, most ribosomal proteins have to travel from the cytoplasm to their incorporation site on pre‐ribosomes within the nucleus. However, due to their particular characteristics, such as a highly...
Tri‐methylation of lysine 4 on histone H3 (H3K4me3) is a near‐universal chromatin modification at the transcription start site of active genes in eukaryotes from yeast to man and its levels reflect the amount of transcription. Because of this association, H3K4me3 is often described as an ‘activating’ histone modification and assumed to have an instructive role in the transcription of genes, but the...
The evolutionary emergence of animals is one of the most significant episodes in the history of life, but its timing remains poorly constrained. Molecular clocks estimate that animals originated and began diversifying over 100 million years before the first definitive metazoan fossil evidence in the Cambrian. However, closer inspection reveals that clock estimates and the fossil record are less divergent...
Social interactions are essential for animals to reproduce, defend their territory, and raise their young. The conserved nature of social behaviors across animal species suggests that the neural pathways underlying the motivation for, and the execution of, specific social responses are also maintained. Modern tools of neuroscience have offered new opportunities for dissecting the molecular and neural...
Parallel evolution is the repeated evolution of the same phenotype or genotype in evolutionarily independent populations. Here, we use evolve‐and‐resequence experiments with bacteria and yeast to dissect the drivers of parallel evolution at the gene level. A meta‐analysis shows that parallel evolution is often rare, but there is a positive relationship between population size and the probability...
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