Credit: Vilcek Foundation / Ian Johns Photograph One of life’s great mysteries is how a single egg cell can contain all the information needed to...


After giving a talk in Seattle about chromosome pairing, Chao-ting (Ting) Wu boarded the redeye flight back to Boston and settled in to read a...


NUN bodies in C. elegans offer clues about nervous system differentiation. One of the most active areas of research today explores the differences between individual...


Mitochondria on the mind

September 14, 2018

Mitochondria cell-autonomously regulate the secretion of neuropeptides in C. elegans. Neurons are hard-working cells that need a lot of energy to do their jobs, so...


Holes in the plasma membrane trigger the activation of the Torso receptor tyrosine kinase. As a general rule, cells don’t do well when holes are...


GC content alone is associated with distinct functional classes of human enhancers. Because enhancers can be located hundreds of kilobases away from their target genes,...


Recent evolution of simple germ–soma division in a green alga sheds light on the early stages of complex multicellular life. Among evolution’s greatest innovations are...


In the late 1980s, Japanese biologist Yoshimori Ohsumi finally got to run a lab of his own and began casting around for a suitable topic...


At the time of her death in 1912, Nettie Maria Stevens was a biologist of enough repute to be eulogized in the journal Science by...


Compared to a human, a tree, or a jellyfish, the single-celled yeast might seem like a loner. Multicellular organisms like plants and animals are complex...