CAR keeps up the (heart) beat

CAR keeps up the (heart) beat

Like a tourist without a map, tumor-fighting T cells have a hard time finding their destination without directions. According to Clark et al. (page 2221), dismantling these directions helps skin cancer cells hide from killer T cells. To enter the skin, T cells must grab on to the adhesive molecule E-selectin, which is expressed on the endothelial cells lining blood vessels in the skin. The auth...

Protein coat keeps axons buttoned up

Tat substrates open the por tal A ldridge et al. suggest how chloroplast proteins could induce assembly of the pore complex that transports them across the thylakoid membrane. The twin-arginine translocase (Tat) complex transports folded proteins across the thylakoid membranes of chloroplasts and the plasma membrane of bacteria. The chloroplast Tat complex consists of the multipass transmembran...

Beat Heart Disease

GABA Keeps Up an Appetite for Life

In the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus, neurons that produce the neuropeptides NPY and AgRP play a vital role in the maintenance of energy homeostasis. In this issue, Wu et al. (2009) show that these neurons modulate feeding behavior in mice by providing GABAergic input to the parabrachial nucleus in the brainstem.

The initiation of the heart beat.

During a normal lifetime, the heart may beat over 2 billion times, but the mechanisms by which the heart beats are initiated remain a subject of intense investigation. Since the discovery of a pacemaker current (I(f)) in 1978, multiple studies have shown that rhythmic changes in membrane voltage (the "membrane voltage clock") underlie the mechanisms of automaticity. The I(f) is a depolarization...