Notable

Z. Mourelatos et al., "miRNPs: A novel class of ribonucleoproteins containing numerous microRNAs," Genes & Development, 16[6]:720-8, March 15, 2002. "A novel ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex in HeLa cells was identified that contains two proteins implicated in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), eIF2C2 (a member of the Argonaute family), and numerous small RNAs ~22 nucleotides in length. The finding that microRNAs (miRNAs) associate with eIF2C2 ties together genetic findings demonstrating that Argonaute family members are required for maturation of small temporal RNAs and short interfering RNAs, and that Argonaute 2 is a component of RISC (RNA induced silencing complex), essential for RNA interference. The finding that one of SMA proteins is a DEAD-box RNA helicase suggests it may be involved in RNA unwinding or RNA restructuring events. Overall, this paper provides new information about miRNAs, the proteins they associate with, and their possible connection to a devastating neurodegenerative disease." —Marjori Matzke, Institute of Molecular Biology, Austria Ovarian Cancer Model S. Orsulic et al., "Induction of ovarian cancer by defined multiple genetic changes in a mouse model system," Cancer Cell, 1:53-62, February 2002. "A major deficiency in ovarian carcinoma research is the lack of in vivo models that recapitulate tumor development and progression. In this report, Orsulic and coworkers have utilized an avian retroviral gene delivery technique to introduce single or multiple oncogenes into the isolated ovarian cells from p53-deficient mice. Reimplantation of infected cells containing two or more oncogenes (c-myc, K-ras, Akt) induced formation of tumors that proliferate and metastasize intraperitoneally. This new in vivo model should greatly facilitate future studies designed to test factors and therapeutics that impact tumor progression, invasion, and metastasis." —M. Sharon Stack, Northwestern University Medical School, US Protein-Phospholipid Interactions W.E. Hughes et al., "Detecting protein-phospholipid interactions; EGF-induced activation of phospholipase D1b in situ," Journal of Biological Chemistry, 10.1074/ jbc.M201391200, April 11, 2002 [Epub ahead of print], available at www.jbc.org. "This is a very nice study showing that it is possible to detect direct interaction of phospholipase D with its phospholipid substrate in living mammalian cells. The method relies on incorporation of fluorescently labeled phospholipids, BODIPY-phospholipids, into living cells and using FRET methods to detect interaction between GFP-tagged phospholipase D and fluorescent phospholipids. This protein-lipid interaction was seen with phosphatidylcholine but not with phosphatidylethanolamine, perhaps because the latter does not bind to the catalytic site of phospholipidase D or because the enzyme binds to intracellular membranes that are poor in phosphatidylethanolamine." —Michael Gelb, University of Washington, US Protein Engineering B. Liu et al., "Toward synthetic transcription activators: recruitment of transcription factors to DNA by a PNA-peptide chimera," Journal of the American Chemical Society, 124[9]:1838-9, March 6, 2002. "Mimicking complex transcription factors with small molecules is a useful way to study the assembly of the transcriptional machinery complex and the specific role of a specific transcription factor. This paper describes an efficient way to generate these transcription factor mimics using compounds from simple binding screens. The authors combined a sequence-specific DNA binding sequence of peptide nucleic acid with a peptide sequence discovered using phage display to bind to other transcription factors, and then found that the conjugate could efficiently bind DNA and recruit the Gal80 transcription factor to form the complex." —Ross Weatherman, Purdue University, US Bioinformatics B. Ma et al., "PatternHunter: Faster and more sensitive homology search," Bioinformatics, 18[3]:440-5, March 2002. "The authors enhance the technique of seeded alignment, commonly used to find similarities quickly in nucleic acid sequences, by using seeds that sample a noncontiguous set of residues. This modification of a technique used by the popular BLASTN program, for example, is shown to improve the sensitivity/ specificity tradeoff of seeded alignment in practice, as well as suggesting a general theoretical approach to optimal seed design for similarity-search algorithms. Although noncontiguous seeds have previously been studied for improving the performance of seeded alignment, this paper is significant because its approach is effective and theoretically well-grounded, yet can be implemented as only a minor modification to existing tools such as BLASTN. The authors give only a high-level description of their methods, leaving a more detailed discussion of the theory used to generate their seeds to a future paper." —Jeremy Buhler, Washington University in St. Louis, US 3D Microscopy J. Sharpe et al., "Optical projection tomography as a tool for 3D microscopy and gene expression studies," Science, 296[5567]:541-5, April 19, 2002. "Stunning, novel technique for rapidly analyzing embryo anatomy and gene expression in three dimensions. This new principle, optical projection tomography, is likely to have a revolutionary impact on our understanding of genetic networks controlling development, on our knowledge of developmental anatomy, and in interpreting mutant phenotype. Although, of course, it is important to read the hard copy of the manuscript, the best way to appreciate this new breakthrough is to look at the movies on: genex.hgu.mrc.ac.uk/OPT_Microscopy." —Nicholas Hastie, MRC Human Genetics Unit, UK

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