WIKIMEDIA, HANNES ROSTA team led by investigators at the Max-Planck-Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics has found that methylation of Notch can have substantial effects on the protein’s activities. Their findings were published in Science Signaling this week (March 24).
Methylation “both leads to the degradation of Notch, but it is also very important for activation. It has an enigmatic role,” said geneticist Rhett Kovall of the University of Cincinnati, who was not involved in the work.
“Notch signaling is very context- and tissue-dependent,” Kovall continued. For example, “most of the time Notch is an oncogene, but there are a number of cases where it is actually a tumor suppressor. . . . It’s incredibly complex.”
LUCIO VERA-CABRERAResearchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and their colleagues reported the sequence of Mycobacterium lepromatosis, which causes a rare form of leprosy, in PNAS this week (March 23). The team also compared the newly sequenced species with M. leprae, the bacterium previously believed to be to sole cause of the disease. Among other things, the comparative study identified how the two species split millions of years ago.
“It appears, to me, to be a landmark paper, which really provides a bounty of insight into this newly recognized and little-understood organism,” said ...
