Any which way but loose back-to-back arrangement of kinetochores is not needed for correct alignment on the mitotic spindle, as shown by Hilary Dewar, Tomoyuki Tanaka (University of Dundee, UK), and colleagues. Sister chromatids are glued together by cohesin such that their kinetochores face opposing poles. This arrangement might thus prevent both chromatids from attaching to spindle microtubul...

In the past few years, the idea of extending the Grid to cover also the remote access, control, management of instrument devices has been explored in a few initiatives. Existing tools lack in generality and require advanced specialized computer science knowledge, thus making them difficult to be broadly adopted in the scientific community. In this paper we present a new open source initiative t...

The landscape of alternative splicing is only beginning to unravel, and the functional consequences are often unclear. Two articles in Cell and Genome Research focus on a set of largely ignored yet highly conserved exons, microexons. These appear strongly regulated by RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) and functionally modulate protein–protein interactions with strong evidence for deregulation in auti...

We describe the design, synthesis and biophysical characterization of a novel DNA construct in which a folded quadruplex structure is joined to a standard double helix. Circular dichroism, gel electrophoresis, three-dimensional UV melting and differential scanning calorimetry were all used to characterize the structure. Rigorous molecular dynamics simulations were used to build a plausible atom...

Can we scale down robots to small scales and realize them with self-organizing molecules? As biological cells already act a little like – they sense, compute, move, respond their environment the answer is probably “yes”. But wide range of interesting physical challenges have be tackled.

This article explores the tiny house movement as a contemporary example of alternative housing practices. Within stories women tell about their journeys, we uncover diverse prefigurative practices and politics, which in turn invoke an expanded sense fairness agency through housing. Framed by Colin Ward’s work on dweller-control self-help, draws interviews with over 30 from Europe, UK, US, Austr...