Protecting the ends

Patronin Regulates the Microtubule Network by Protecting Microtubule Minus Ends

Tubulin assembles into microtubule polymers that have distinct plus and minus ends. Most microtubule plus ends in living cells are dynamic; the transitions between growth and shrinkage are regulated by assembly-promoting and destabilizing proteins. In contrast, minus ends are generally not dynamic, suggesting their stabilization by some unknown protein. Here, we have identified Patronin (also k...

Evolution of diverse mechanisms for protecting chromosome ends by the Drosophila TART telomere retrotransposons

Meeting our ends by our means: protecting children from SHS in research.

In this issue, we published a paper on sleep bruxism in children exposed to secondhand smoke (see page 392). After publication, we received a letter (below) raising questions about the ethics of the study. Normally, responses to papers are published electronically as Rapid Responses, because we simply do not have page space for extensive discussions between authors and readers. However, we take...

Evolution of diverse mechanisms for protecting chromosome ends by Drosophila TART telomere retrotransposons.

The retrotransposons HeT-A, TART, and TAHRE, which maintain Drosophila telomeres, transpose specifically onto chromosome ends to form long arrays that extend the chromosome and compensate for terminal loss. Because they transpose by target-primed reverse transcription, each element is oriented so that its 5' end serves as the extreme end of the chromosome until another element transposes to occ...

On Ends-to-Ends Encryption

In the past few years secure messaging has become mainstream, with over a billion active users of end-to-end encryption protocols through apps such as WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, Google Allo, Wire and many more. While these users’ two-party communications now enjoy very strong security guarantees, it turns out that many of these apps provide, without notifying the users, a weaker prop...