How to Activate a Damage-Tolerant Polymerase

How to Activate a Power

Checkpoints: How to activate p53

One in three people are touched by cancer at least once in their lifetime. Over half of human tumours are associated with mutations that either directly affect the protein p53 or affect components of pathways that regulate p53. The discovery that ‘checkpoint’ pathways, which monitor the structural integrity of our chromosomes, stabilise and activate p53 in response to DNA damage indicated how t...

How to Activate the Learner

Universities are facing major challenges with increasing numbers of students and the requirement of cost savings. They intend to maintain international state-of-the-art research while providing future employees a high-quality education. In order to achieve these often conflicting goals of researching and teaching, innovative learning approaches need to be developed. We therefore propose a desig...

A damage-tolerant glass.

Owing to a lack of microstructure, glassy materials are inherently strong but brittle, and often demonstrate extreme sensitivity to flaws. Accordingly, their macroscopic failure is often not initiated by plastic yielding, and almost always terminated by brittle fracture. Unlike conventional brittle glasses, metallic glasses are generally capable of limited plastic yielding by shear-band sliding...

How to regulate a gene: to repress or to activate?

Gene-expression responses to an input can depend on growth conditions; in this issue, Sasson et al. (2012) show that this dependence is lower when the input results in a high degree of promoter occupancy.