Inside Job (Charles Ferguson)

An inside job.

Tubulogenesis: An Inside Job

Size does matter. While endlessly debated in social circles, this is unquestionably true for the normal function of the epithelial and endothelial tubes that comprise such organs as the vascular system, lung and kidney. The enlarged tubules in a polycystic kidney, for instance, literally crush the surrounding normal tubules, while narrowed blood vessels can cause ischemic tissue injuries. Surpr...

Retinoblastoma, an Inside Job

Why are some cell types more prone to transformation than others? In this issue, Xu et al. (2009) show that retinoblastoma cells co-opt several intrinsic features of cone photoreceptors for their survival and growth.

SPP pulls an inside job

Mps1 sends condensin II off to work T he kinase Mps1 has a long todo list during mitosis, and Kagami et al. identify yet another responsibility: promoting chromosome condensation. The condensin I and condensin II complexes prompt diffuse chromatin to scrunch up into mitotic chromosomes. Condensin II gets a head start on its partner, but researchers still aren’t sure which enzymes switch on cond...

Auxin-regulated cell polarity: an inside job?

Auxin is now known to be a key regulator of polar events in plant cells. The mechanism by which auxin conveys a polar signal to the cell is unknown, but one well-known hypothesis is that the auxin flux across the plasma membrane regulates vesicle trafficking. This hypothesis remains controversial because of its reliance on an as-yet-undiscovered membrane flux sensor. In this article I suggest i...