Mixed Messages: How Bacteria Resolve Conflicting Signals

Mixed messages: how bacteria resolve conflicting signals.

An elegant new study by Bollenbach and Kishony (2011) in this issue of Molecular Cell shows how bacteria resolve the apparent conflicts created when they face two signals with opposite effects on gene expression.

Integrating Conflicting Chemotactic Signals

Leukocytes navigate through complex chemoattractant arrays, and in so doing, they must migrate from one chemoattractant source to another. By evaluating directional persistence and chemotaxis during neutrophil migration under agarose, we show that cells migrating away from a local chemoattractant, against a gradient, display true chemotaxis to distant agonists, often behaving as if the local gr...

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 ...

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...