Reviews & Analysis

Cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR), a Cl⁻-ion channel, assembles into dynamic macromolecular complexes. Understanding how these complexes regulate the intracellular trafficking and activity of CFTR provides a unique insight into the aetiology of cystic fibrosis and other diseases.

Polymerizing actin seems to provide the force for deforming and moving membranes at different steps of the endocytic pathway. Live-cell imaging is shedding light on the order and timing of the molecular events and mechanisms of actin function during endocytosis.

The nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) pathway ensures that mRNAs that harbour premature termination, or nonsense, codons are targeted for rapid degradation. New insights into the process of NMD have provided unexpected glimpses of the complexity of translation termination.

Protein-chip technology is a powerful tool for high-throughput assays of protein profiling, protein–DNA interactions and enzyme activity. Improvements in the technology, such as the construction of whole-proteome arrays in yeast, could lead to the description of comprehensive interaction maps in many organisms.

Several non-coding RNAs that regulate eukaryotic mRNA transcription have recently been discovered. Their mechanisms of action and biological roles are extremely diverse, which indicates that, so far, we have only had a glimpse of this new class of regulatory factor.

Post-translational modifications define the functional and structural plasticity of proteins in archaea, prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Combining state-of-the-art technologies in molecular cell biology, protein mass spectrometry and bioinformatics, it is now feasible to study the role of distinct protein post-translational modifications.

What makes a stem cell is still poorly understood. Recent studies have uncovered that chromatin might hold some of the keys to how embryonic stem cells maintain their pluripotency, their ability to self-renew and induce lineage specification.

ADP-ribosylation factor (ARF) proteins regulate membrane trafficking and actin remodelling along the secretory and endocytic pathways. However, recent evidence has revealed that the function of ARF proteins can influence cellular processes such as phagocytosis, cell division and tumour-cell invasion.

Recent studies have highlighted the crucial role of ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like modifications in the regulation of translesion DNA synthesis and various DNA-repair processes such as homologous recombination, nucleotide-excision repair and base-excision repair.

Vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGFs) regulate vascular development during embryogenesis and angiogenesis in the adult. The recently developed cancer treatments that target VEGF receptor activation highlight the clinical relevance of inhibiting VEGF pathways that are exaggerated in pathological angiogenesis.

Structural maintenance of chromosomes (SMC) proteins are highly conserved ATPases that function in chromosome organization and dynamics. Their unique architecture provides insight into how these protein machines tether, fold and manipulate the genome in an ATP-dependent manner.

Lipid rafts, if they exist in resting cell membranes, are too small to be resolved by fluorescent microscopy and have no defined ultrastructure. However, recent studies with model membranes, computational modelling and innovative cell-biology techniques have provided new insights into plasma-membrane micro-organization.

The visualization of protein complexes in living cells enables the investigation of molecular interactions in their native environment. Bimolecular fluorescence complementation analysis has been used to visualize protein interactions and modifications in different cell types and species.

Mismatch repair improves the fidelity of DNA replication and affects recombination, DNA-damage signalling, apoptosis and certain cell-type-specific processes of DNA metabolism. Intriguingly, the same system that guards genomic instability on the one hand contributes to cell death on the other.

Studies on yeast vacuole inheritance have identified rules that probably apply to most organelle-inheritance pathways. They have found a partially conserved mechanism for membrane-cargo transport, and shown that the transport complex regulates the destination and timing of vacuole movement.

The NDR protein kinases regulate morphological changes, mitotic exit, cytokinesis, cell proliferation and apoptosis, as well as neuronal growth and differentiation. Combined data from different model organisms now highlight the conserved roles of these kinases in physiology and disease.

The idea that ejaculated spermatozoa 'race' towards the mature egg and compete to fertilize it is no longer thought to be true. Instead, only a small number of spermatozoa are guided towards the egg by specialized mechanisms that include chemotaxis and thermotaxis.

Lipid droplets are the main lipid store in eukaryotic cells. Although the term lipid droplet is widely used, a unified nomenclature is lacking. So, could the terminology be consolidated? And what recent developments have there been in the field of lipid droplets?

Many genome-scale, or 'omics', data sets are becoming available for various model organisms. Although each of these data types is valuable on its own, further insights into whole systems can be gained through the integration of omics data sets.

The difficulties that are associated with the experimental determination of atomic structures for interacting proteins mean that predictive methods are needed for progress. Such structural details can be used to turn abstract system representations into models that more accurately reflect biological reality.