early in the development of many animals, before transcription begins, any change in the pattern of protein synthesis is attributed to a change in the translational activity or stability of mrna in the egg and early embryo. as a result, translational control is critical for a variety of developmental decisions, including oocyte maturation and initiation of preimplantation development. in this s...

This month: protein-complex dynamics (Tan), how noise promotes cell survival (Goulian), multiplex cell-surface-protein detection (Wells), single-cell sequencing (Klein/Socolovsky, Ye), social networks of honeybees (Robinson), new synthetic devices (Liu, Cai), and controlling segmentation clock dynamics (Aulehla).

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Thiolutin is commonly used as a general inhibitor of transcription in yeast. It has been used to calculate mRNA decay rates by stopping the transcription and then determining the relative abundance of individual mRNAs at different times after inhibition. We report here that thiolutin is also an inhibitor of mRNA degradation, and thus its use can lead to miscalculations of mRNA half-lives. The i...

The major pathway of mRNA degradation in yeast occurs through deadenylation, decapping and subsequent 5' to 3' exonucleolytic decay of the transcript body. To identify proteins that control the activity of the decapping enzyme, which is encoded by the DCP1 gene, we isolated a high-copy suppressor of the temperature-sensitive dcp1-2 allele, termed DCP2. Overexpression of Dcp2p partially suppress...

The CCR4-NOT complex is a highly conserved, multifunctional machinery with a general role in controlling mRNA metabolism. It has been implicated in a number of different aspects of mRNA and protein expression, including mRNA degradation, transcription initiation and elongation, ubiquitination, and protein modification. The core CCR4-NOT complex is evolutionarily conserved and consists of at lea...

Background: Maternal mRNA degradation is a selective process that occurs in waves corresponding to important developmental transitions such as resumption of meiosis, fertilization and zygotic genome activation. It has been demonstrated that the number, position, and combination of 3 UTR cis-acting elements interacting with trans-acting protein factors regulate translation and mRNA stability. Ou...

To deal with the growing scale of molecular systems, sophisticated modelling techniques have been designed in recent years to reduce the complexity of mathematical models. Among them, a widely used approach is delayed reaction for simplifying multistep reactions. However, recent research results suggest that a delayed reaction with constant time delay is unable to describe multistep reactions a...

Gene expression profiles are an increasingly common data source that can yield insights into the functions of cells at a system-wide level. The present work considers the limitations in information content of gene expression data for reverse engineering regulatory networks. An in silico genetic regulatory network was constructed for this purpose. Using the in silico network, a formal identifiab...