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[
Nature,
1996]
Springtime finds hopeful anglers baiting hungry fish with twitching worms, both live and artificial. Fish prefer the large annelids, but Kemp and coworkers have knotted on their lines the small, alluring nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which twitches spasmodically when the aptly named protein twitchin goes missing from its muscle cells. And they've caught a big one! On page 636 of this issue, these authors report that the giant protein kinase twitchin, which has a relative molecular mass of 750K and is found in nematode muscle cells, and the protein S100A1(2), a member of the S100 family of calcium-binding proteins, make up a third new calcium-regulated system in muscle which may be of great importance in organizing muscle structure and maintaining its resting tension. They show that a fragment of twitchin containing the autoinhibited kinase domain is specifically activated in a calcium-dependent and zinc-enhanced manner by S100A1(2), but not by the S100B(2) isoform with which it shares 60 percent homology....
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[
Curr Biol,
2011]
Recent work on a Caenorhabditis elegans transmembrane ATPase reveals a central role for the aminophospholipid phosphatidylethanolamine in the production of a class of extracellular vesicles.
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[
Nat Cell Biol,
2011]
Aurora A kinase is a key regulator of cell division, whose functions were attributed to its ability to phosphorylate diverse substrates. Aurora A is now shown to have a kinase-independent role in the regulation of chromatin-mediated microtubule assembly.
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[
Elife,
2015]
Chromosome separation is regulated by a cycle that involves a protein undergoing an unusual topological conversion.
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[
Curr Biol,
2015]
As a microtubule-organizing center, the centrosome undergoes a dramatic increase in size - via expansion of the pericentriolar material - during mitosis. Recent work reveals shared assembly properties of a protein scaffold that facilitates and supports this expansion, a process critical to spindle assembly.
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[
Cell,
2014]
Li et al. demonstrate that a single interneuron can regulate analog- and digital-like behaviors guided by two different postsynaptic neurons. Releasing a single neurotransmitter onto downstream neurons that express receptors with distinct biophysical properties enables a small set of neurons to direct a range of functional responses.
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[
Nat Chem Biol,
2009]
Screening a library of expressed cyclic peptides identified clones that reverse the cytotoxicity of alpha-synuclein in yeast and Caenorhabditis elegans. The results suggest a new approach for intervention in Parkinson's disease, and perhaps a druggable target.
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[
Curr Biol,
2017]
A landmark study has revealed that an interleukin-17-like signaling system modulates a neural circuit that controls the aggregation behavior of nematodes.
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[
Curr Biol,
2013]
In the defecation motor program of Caenorhabditis elegans, a pacemaker rhythm generated by the intestine leads to the activation of motor neurons controlling enteric muscle contraction. A new study demonstrates that this signal is conveyed by a neuropeptide that is released from intestinal cells and acutely depolarizes the motorneurons, acting much like a classical neurotransmitter.
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Mol Cell,
2014]
Using Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system, Norris et al. (2014) define complex combinatorial regulation of alternative splicing at single-neuron resolution and illustrate functional coherence among components of a splicing regulatory network controlled by a neuronal splicing factor.