PAPERS TO WATCH

Transcription is tentative

Robert Singer and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York recently visualized individual Dictyostelium discoideum cells transcribing dscA, a gene that increases in expression during development. Using an in vivo system that tags nacent mRNA, they showed dscA is transcribed in pulses.1 Rather than a steady, wholesale increase in transcription, Singer?s group showed the intensity and duration of dscA transcription pulses remain the same. Surprisingly, it?s the number of expressing cells that increases. Roger Patient, Faculty of 1000 member and professor at the University of Oxford, says this paper "forces you to think about transcription in a completely different way."


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