Transcription goes digital

Transcription goes digital.

Transcription is a complex process that integrates the state of the cell and its environment to generate adequate responses for cell fitness and survival. Recent microscopy experiments have been able to monitor transcription from single genes in individual cells. These observations have revealed two striking features: transcriptional activity can vary markedly from one cell to another, and is s...

PARP Goes Transcription

PARP-1, an enzyme that catalyzes the attachment of ADP ribose units to target proteins, plays at least two important roles in transcription regulation. First, PARP-1 modifies histones and creates an anionic poly(ADPribose) matrix that binds histones, thereby promoting the decondensation of higher-order chromatin structures. Second, PARP-1 acts as a component of enhancer/promoter regulatory comp...

Biology Goes Digital

Central Dogma Goes Digital.

In this issue of Molecular Cell, Tay and colleagues (Albayrak et al., 2016) describe a new technique to digitally quantify the numbers of protein and mRNA in the same mammalian cell, providing a new way to look at the central dogma of molecular biology.

Folk Music in India Goes Digital

Folk music forms in India are rich and diverse, varying from region to region across the Indian landscape. The recent explosion of new media technologies (e.g. DVDs, CDs, mobile phones) in both rural and urban India is changing how oral folk music is being performed, produced, distributed, and shared. To further understand this impact, we conducted an extended field study across four field site...