Abstract Colonic crypts are tubular glands that multiply through a symmetric branching process called crypt fission. During the early stages of colorectal cancer, normal fission is disturbed, leading to asymmetrical or budding. The challenging shapes budding make it difficult prepare paraffin sections for conventional histology, resulting in colonic cross with only partially visible. To study s...

Myosins-I are widely expressed actin-dependent motors which bear a phospholipid-binding domain. In addition, some members of the family can trigger Arp2/3 complex (actin-related protein 2/3 complex)-dependent actin polymerization. In the early 1990s, the development of powerful genetic tools in protozoa and mammals and discovery of these motors in yeast allowed the demonstration of their roles ...

Clathrin-mediated endocytosis is driven by a complex machinery of proteins, which assemble in a regular order at the plasma membrane. The assembly of the endocytic machinery is conventionally thought to be a continuous process of mechanistically dependent steps, starting from a defined initiation step. Indeed, several initiation mechanisms involving single proteins have been proposed in mammali...

In this commentary I shall discuss recent findings on higher-order chromosome structure in yeast, a unicellular eukaryote. There are two kinds of yeast under current intensive investigation: namely, the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe. I shall emphasize that yeast chromosomal proteins in many ways resemble those of higher eukaryotes. A majo...

Inosine (I) at position 34 (wobble position) of tRNA is formed by the hydrolytic deamination of a genomically encoded adenosine (A). The enzyme catalyzing this reaction, termed tRNA A:34 deaminase, is the heterodimeric Tad2p/ADAT2.Tad3p/ADAT3 complex in eukaryotes. In budding yeast, deletion of each subunit is lethal, indicating that the wobble inosine tRNA modification is essential for viabili...

The formation of clathrin-coated endocytic vesicles is driven by a complex and highly dynamic molecular machinery. In this issue, Idrissi et al. (Idrissi, F.-Z., H. Grötsch, I.M. Fernández-Golbano, C. Presciatto-Baschong, H. Riezman, and M.-I. Geli. 2008. J. Cell Biol. 180:1219-1232) reveal some of the secrets of this machinery by analyzing the localizations of nine endocytic proteins during ve...

HTLV-I is the etiologic agent for adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATL) and HTLV-I-associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis (HAM/TSP). Taxi, the major activator of this virus, is a 40- kDa (353 amino acid) phosphoprotein, predominantly localized in the nucleus of the host cell, which functions to trans-activate both viral and cellular promoters. Recently it has been shown that HTLV-I a...