Rebecca Heald: Passionate about cycles

Rebecca Heald: Passionate about cycles

W hen she isn't cycling up a mountain, Rebecca Heald is blazing new trails in cell biology. Her work on dynamic cytoskeletal structures involved in mitosis and meio-sis—particularly the microtubule-based mitotic spindle—has continually set the pace in her fi eld. After completing her graduate studies on nuclear lamins in Frank McKeon's laboratory at Harvard (1), Heald sought a change of scenery...

Rebecca Heald

to this methodological challenge, Cory Miller and Yale Cohen suggest that we can glean how nonhuman primates perceive communication sounds if we (as is often done with humans) consider these sounds as auditory ‘objects’ that the animals have an ongoing need to categorize and to segregate from other sound objects, so as to expedite and stabilize their perception in natural settings. Within the p...

Dominique Bergmann: Passionate about plant polarity

All About Mitochondrial Eve: An Interview with Rebecca Cann

In unearthing the genetic history of human populations, the recent pace of discovery has been so rapid that we can lose sight of the impact made by a single paper. In a 1987 Nature article, Rebecca Cann and her co-workers, Mark Stoneking and the late Allan Wilson, painstakingly analyzed mitochondrial DNA purified from placentas that had been collected from women of many different ancestral orig...

Rebecca Safran

Rebecca Safran Q & A 5-methylcytosine. This specificity is unusual in fungi, but was predicted in prior studies of de novo methylation of repeated genes in C. cinerea. Recent attention has been focused on an additional modified base, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, and its role in ‘poised chromatin’ in stem cells. The C. cinerea genome contains 38 copies of a gene predicted to carry out this conversio...