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Plants withstand salt with a mechanism that resembles the action of mammalian Tau protein
CC1 is an indispensable protein for plants to grow on salty lands. A study in “Nature Communications” by Christopher Kesten and Arndt Wallmann sheds light on its mechanism that resembles the action of the mammalian Tau protein, which plays a central role in the development of Alzheimer’s diseas
Structural insight into substrate and inhibitor discrimination by human P-glycoprotein
ABCB1 is a key multidrug exporter in humans that uses ATP to extrude a large array of chemically and structurally diverse compounds across cellular membranes. A recent “Science” paper by the Locher group (IMBB) sheds lights on the chemistry governing substrate and inhibitor binding in human ABCB1.
Chronic Virus Infection Compromises non-virus-specific T cell Responses numerically and functionally
Chronic viral infections modulate immune responsiveness to other microbial challenges or vaccination. A recent "Journal of Experimental Medicine" paper by the Oxenius group (IMB) identifies mechanisms by which chronic viral infections compromise non-virus-specific memory T lymphocyte responses in their number, phenotype and function.
Opening up the single-cell toolbox for microbial natural products research
In nature, microbes do not live in sterile cultures but in complex communities. New tools have been developed to select and study single cells from natural samples, and a review from the Piel group (Microbiology) published in "Angewandte Chemie" suggests these techniques could be of use to chemists interested in the molecules produced by these bacteria.
A public resource to quantify the proteome of zebrafish
The ensemble of proteins (proteome) present in a cell determine its biochemical state and is thus of critical importance for molecular biology. SWATH-MS is a mass spectrometric method to quantify in parallel thousands of proteins from the same biological sample that relies on a spectral library for determining protein quantities. A recent article in “Scientific Data” by the Aebersold group describes such a large spectral library to quantify 10’000 proteins in the model organism zebrafish.