Mixed gauginos sending mixed messages to the LHC

Sending Mixed Messages for Cell Population Control

Cells often receive signals to proliferate, but how population density is controlled is unclear. Hart et al. now show that a single secreted molecule that instructs both proliferation and death in T cells establishes a bistable response: the population is driven to either extinction or to a homeostatically defined density.

Mixed messages

Mixed messages

plants are cloaked in hundreds of tiny projections, known as trichomes. These structures vary in function, shape, size and spacing from species to species, and it’s not known whether similar cellular differentiation programs are responsible for making trichomes in different plants. Trichomes are clearly visible in the scanning electron micrograph of a wild-type Nicotiana tabacum seedling above ...

Oncogenic herpesviruses sending mixed signals.

Human herpesvirus infections are generally asymptomatic in immune-competent hosts; however, immune dysfunction can unveil inherent oncogenic properties associated with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and Kaposi’s sarcoma herpesvirus (KSHV) infection. Although these viruses were first discovered in human tumor specimens in 1964 and 1994, respectively, it was discovered later on that large proportions o...

NPY's mixed messages

According to a study on page 1575, cellular debris might help trigger the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Vollmer and colleagues show that endogenous complexes of RNA and protein, often released from dying cells, engage activating receptors in dendritic cells (DCs). The activated DCs then launch an inappropriate immune response against these self-complexes, thus triggerin...