BolA Is a Transcriptional Switch That Turns Off Motility and Turns On Biofilm Development

BolA Is a Transcriptional Switch That Turns Off Motility and Turns On Biofilm Development

UNLABELLED Bacteria are extremely versatile organisms that rapidly adapt to changing environments. When bacterial cells switch from planktonic growth to biofilm, flagellum formation is turned off and the production of fimbriae and extracellular polysaccharides is switched on. BolA is present in most Gram-negative bacteria, and homologues can be found from proteobacteria to eukaryotes. Here, we ...

Epigenetic switch turns on genetic behavioral variations.

What roles do environmental factors, genes, and heredity play in shaping the behaviors of individuals? In his 1963 article entitled “Behavior genetics and individuality understood,” the pioneering behavioral geneticist Jerry Hirsch (1) eloquently articulated that “Individual differences are no accident. They are generated by properties of organisms as fundamental to behavioral science and biolo...

Quasars: What Turns Them Off?

While the high-redshift quasar luminosity function closely parallels the hierarchical growth of dark matter halos, at lower redshifts quasars exhibit an anti-hierarchical turn-off, which moves from the most luminous objects to the faintest. We explore the idea that this may arise from self-regulating feedback, caused by quasar outflows. Using a detailed hydrodynamic simulation we calculate the ...

The Rrop GTPase switch turns on polar growth in pollen.

Pollen-tube growth not only represents an essential stage of plant reproduction but also provides an attractive model for studying cell polarity and morphogenesis. For many years, pollen-tube growth has been known to require a tip-focused Ca2+ gradient and dynamic F actin, but the way that these are controlled remained a mystery until recently. Rop appears to be activated at growth sites by a t...

Development of a New Jughandle Design for Facilitating High- Volume Left Turns and U-turns