Autoimmunity: IL‐21: a new player in Th17‐cell differentiation

Vaccination as an additional player in the mosaic of autoimmunity.

CTLA4 Gene Variants in Autoimmunity and Cancer: a Comparative Review

Gene association studies are less appealing in cancer compared to autoimmune diseases. Complexity, heterogeneity, variation in histological types, age at onset, short survival, and acute versus chronic conditions are cancer related factors which are different from an organ specific autoimmune disease, such as Grave’s disease, on which a large body of multicentre data is accumulated. For years t...

A new player in Pol II pausing.

Transcriptional control plays a primary role in gene expression and can be exerted at multiple levels of the transcription process, such as RNA polymerase recruitment and promoter-proximal pausing. A recent report published in The EMBO Journal (Li and Gilmour, 2013) provides new insights into the regulation of a large class of paused genes through the identification of a novel transcription fac...

miR-137: A New Player in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a complex genetic disease and characterized by affective, cognitive, neuromorphological, and molecular abnormalities that may have a neurodevelopmental origin. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are critical to neurodevelopment and adult neuronal processes by modulating the activity of multiple genes within biological networks. MiR-137 as a brain-enriched microRNA, plays important roles in reg...

Cdc14b: A New Player in Aging

encodes a dual specificity protein phosphatase essential for mitotic exit. There are two Cdc14 isoforms (a and b) in vertebrates. Cdc14a localizes to the centrosome and Cdc14b localizes to the nucleolus [1]. The two mammalian Cdc14 isoforms have been speculated to exert essential mitotic functions, given the role of budding yeast ScCdc14 played in the cell cycle and the fact that both human CDC...