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The plant microbiota establishes similarly year after year, but the assembly principles are poorly understood. The Vorholt group shed light on how arrival order and single strains affected bacterial community structure in the phyllosphere. The paper is published in "Nature Ecology & Evolution."

The hedgehog receptor Patched-1 (PTCH1) plays a key role in the hedgehog signaling pathway as a putative cholesterol transporter. A recent paper in Science Advances by the Korkhov (IBC & PSI) and Wutz groups (IMHS) provides clues for understanding the structural basis of PTCH1-sterol interactions.

Many cellular processes rely on specifying the function of individual microtubule filaments. The Barral group (IBC) shows in ‘eLIFE’ that microtubule organizing centers use a motor protein to communicate with the distal end of their associated microtubules and remotely control their behavior.

The complexity of molecular structures in the cell is amazing. Having achieved great success in elucidating these structures in recent years, biologists are now taking on the next challenge: to find out more about how they are constructed. A joint research project between two groups from ETH Zurich and the University of Bern now provides insight into a very unusual construction process in the unicellular parasite Trypanosoma brucei.

Treatment of BRAF-mutant melanomas with mitogen-activated protein kinase inhibitors (MAPKi) results in significant tumor regression, but acquired resistance is pervasive. A Clinical Cancer Research paper by the Krek/Kovacs group (IMHS) describes a metabolic shift in MAPKi-treated melanomas that might be exploited to prevent therapeutic resistance.