When galaxies get together

Primes Get Together

Mathematics has long been an important tool in infectious disease epidemiology. I will provide a brief overview of compartmental models, the dominant framework for modeling disease transmission, and then contact network epidemiology, a more powerful approach that applies bond percolation on random graphs to model the spread of infectious disease through heterogeneous populations. I will derive ...

A get-together for caspases

During development, epithelial cells need a little help fi guring out which way is up. Jaffe et al. show how a polarizing protein ensures that the cells face the right direction. A newborn epithelial cell in, say, the intestinal lining will polarize so that its apical surface is oriented toward the gut lumen. The protein Cdc42 helps set up polarity in a range of organisms and cell types, and pr...

Data→information→knowledge→wisdom: when is South Africa going to get her act together?

ALT Telomeres Get Together with Nuclear Receptors

Nuclear receptors bind chromosome ends in "alternative lengthening of telomeres" (ALT) cancer cells that maintain their ends by homologous recombination instead of telomerase. Marzec et al. now demonstrate that, in ALT cells, nuclear receptors not only trigger distal chromatin associations to mediate telomere-telomere recombination events, but also drive chromosome-internal targeted telomere in...

When sparks get old

Sparks are transient local elevations of Ca ion concentration observed in different types of muscle cells. Such local Ca2+ signals can be provoked in skeletal muscle cells by altering the osmotic pressure of the extracellular solution. In this issue, Weisleder et al. (see p. 639) demonstrate that the Ca2+ response to osmotic stress is substantially altered in aged muscle. The study presents evi...