Close contact and AIDS

Close Contact Fluctuations: Time of Contact

The letter resolves the long standing debate as to the proper time scale (< τ >) of the onset of the immunological synapse (IS) bond, the non-covalent chemical bond defining the immune pathways involving T-cells and antigen presenting cells (APC). Results from our model calculations show < τ > to be of the order of seconds instead of minutes. Close to the linearly stable regime, we show that in...

Autophagy: Close Contact Keeps Out the Uninvited

In selective autophagy, autophagosomes sequester specific targets to be degraded in lysosomes/vacuoles. A new study now provides critical insights into the mechanism by which the autophagosomal membrane closely sticks to the target to avoid incorporating material that should not be degraded.

Diseases Spread by Close Personal Contact

Mixing patterns and the spread of close-contact infectious diseases

Surprisingly little is known regarding the human mixing patterns relevant to the spread of close-contact infections, such as measles, influenza and meningococcal disease. This study aims to estimate the number of partnerships that individuals make, their stability and the degree to which mixing is assortative with respect to age. We defined four levels of putative at-risk events from casual (ph...

Keep Your Friends Close: Cell-Cell Contact and Skeletal Myogenesis.

Development of skeletal muscle is a multistage process that includes lineage commitment of multipotent progenitor cells, differentiation and fusion of myoblasts into multinucleated myofibers, and maturation of myofibers into distinct types. Lineage-specific transcriptional regulation lies at the core of this process, but myogenesis is also regulated by extracellular cues. Some of these cues are...