Chaperone Keeps the Silence

The minimal genome keeps growing.

Breaking the silence

" Like all good memoirs it has not been emasculated by considerations of good taste. " That was Peter Medawar's verdict on The Double Helix, Jim Watson's ebullient succès de scandale. Watson's exuberant style, let it be said right away, is not Maurice Wilkins's. He and Francis Crick were outraged by Watson's account — now a modern classic, at number seven in the American Modern Library's roll o...

The Signs of Silence

How does auditory cortex respond to silence? In this issue of Neuron, show that activity in macaque auditory cortex is highly structured even in the absence of sensory stimuli. These data reveal a close link between spontaneous neural activity and the functional organization of auditory cortex.

The silence of genes

Although the discovery of genomic imprinting dates back more than two decades, its significance for both disease pathogenesis and evolutionary theory is only now emerging. However, its effects had been observed for much longer, and if biologists had been influenced less by prevailing orthodoxies, they might have stumbled on it sooner. Mule breeders encountered the phenomenon three millennia ago...

Ubiquitylation keeps the nucleus moving

Ubiquitylation keeps the nucleus moving H ayakawa et al. reveal that many components of the yeast nuclear pore complex (NPC) are ubiquitylated and describe how this modifi cation helps segregate the nucleus during mitosis. NPCs and their constituent nucleoporin proteins control several cellular processes, including molecular transport between the nucleus and cytoplasm. These functions can be re...