RUIN’S PROGENY

Governance in the Ruins

Song Among the Ruins

American distress at the horrors produced by the atomic bombs released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 generated a laudable desire to salvage something positive from the damage. Immediately after the war, the American government sent survey teams to the bombed cities to evaluate the extent and nature of the damage. An account of those early days has appeared in The Yale Journal [ 1,2]. The re...

[And new life blossoms from the ruins].

Reconstructing pathogen evolution from the ruins.

Advances in high-throughput sequencing have made genomic comparison an increasingly powerful tool for understanding pathogen evolution. From these analyses, elevated genome degradation has surfaced as a common trait among pathogens with a specialized lifestyle. Prime examples of this trend can be found within the species Salmonella enterica, wherein genomes of host-adapted serovars associated w...

Over-salting ruins the balance of the immune menu.

Regulatory components of the immune system are critical for preventing unintended activation of immune cells. Failure to prevent this unintended activation raises the risk of developing exaggerated inflammation and autoimmunity. In this issue of the JCI, Binger et al. and Hernandez et al. report that salt can play an important role in undermining regulatory mechanisms of the innate and adaptive...