In their recent paper in Cell, Furuyama and Henikoff (2009) report that nucleosomes in centromeres may be right-handed, that is, they wrap DNA in a right-handed manner and induce positive supercoils. This raises intriguing new questions, such as how centromeric histone variants may be assembled into right-handed particles, and why chromatin would retain negative supercoiling in chromosome arms ...

It has been demonstrated that solid hepatoma lysosomes lack hyaluronidase activity, whereas normal rat liver lyso somes contain a high level of this enzyme. This result was also found with lysosomes from an ascites hepatoma, Walker carcinoma 256, and virally transformed BHK cells. In contrast, 0-yV-acetylglucosaminidase activity was shown to be present in lysosomes from tumor cells, although it...

tandem metacentric compound X chromosome is composed of two X chromoA somes attached to a medially located centromere and arranged in tandem sequence so that the synaptic configuration is a spiral (NOVITSKI 1954). An approximation to the tandem metacentric has been achieved by the construction of an attached-X heterozygous for Zn(l)y4 ( SIDOROV, SOKOLOV and TROFIMOV 1936; STURTEVANT and BEADLE ...

NRPE accumulates and all-trans-ROL levels are tranDean Bok siently decreased due to the inability of all-trans-RAL Department of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology to gain access to the dehydrogenase. School of Medicine The reconstitution studies of Sun et al. (1999) utilized University of California, Los Angeles a large array of potential substrates and demonstrated Los Angeles, California 90095 t...

When ionizing radiation strikes a cell it induces DNA double strand breaks (DSBs). Subsequently, some of the DSBs misrejoin and thus cause alterations in the size distribution of the DNA fragments. We derive a system of non-linear integro-differential equations describing the misrejoining interactions of five classes of DNA fragments, including rings and various types of linear fragments. The f...

correspondence correspondence Left is right, right is wrong T he cover illustration of the August 2009 issue of EMBO reports, although aesthetically pleasing, is unfortunately erroneous and could come as a shock to researchers in the chromatin field. Canonical nucleosomes are indeed left-handed, such as the nucleosomes in the left 'column' of chro-matin fibres on the cover. However, in the righ...

hy a new edition of The Nature of the Judicial Process? Presumably because in the world of law, Benjamin Cardozo still rocks, and his opinions and writings still send worthwhile messages as we near the 100th anniversary of his election to the bench. All law students and many academics continue to wrestle with a number of his common law opinions. Just this year Professor Lawrence Cunningham devo...

On page 1003 of the original paper, we cited the work of Lievens et al. (2001) as a previous study using isolated synapto-somes to examine glutamate uptake into neuronal vesicles that did not fi nd a signifi cant difference in DHK-specifi c glutamate uptake between R6/2 and wild-type mouse brain. This work should be correctly cited as a previous study using synaptosomal preparations that contai...