Purposeful motion of biological processes can be driven by Brownian motion of macromolecular complexes with one-sided binding biasing movement in one direction: a Brownian ratchet, now proposed to explain membrane motion during a phagocytosis-like process in bacteria.

From the ‡Program in Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics, ‡‡Program in Developmental Biology, and §§Program in Cellular and Molecular Biology, ¶Department of Biochemistry and the §Department of Molecular and Human Genetics, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas 77030 and the **Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California, San Francis...

A crucial event in the hearing process is the transduction of mechanical stimuli into electrical signals by hair cells, the sensory receptors of the internal ear. Stimulation results in the rapid opening of ionic channels in the mechanically sensitive organelles of these cells, their hair bundles. These transduction channels, which are nonselectively permeable, are directly excited by hair-bund...

The F900e is a full-featured Laser Scanning system that provides high-resolution confocal fluorescence and reflectedlight images. This advanced system has the unrivaled performance offered by a totally new approach to confocal design. Incorporating Optiscan’s patented fiber optic technology, the F900e is able to provide flexibility and reliability for the most challenging applications. Axon Ins...

What types of computations are performed on synaptic inputs within the dendritic trees of single neurons? In this issue of Neuron, present a systematic method to reduce complex, biophysically realistic neuron models to more tractable, simplified two-layered neural networks that could shed some light on this issue.

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors selection papers published in Journal Cell Science, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Lilian Sluimer author on ‘ SKOR1 mediates FER kinase-dependent invasive growth breast cancer cells’, JCS. conducted research described this article while working as first-year master's student and continued proj...