Hearing: travelling wave or resonance?
Published in PLoS biology
Breaking down the stereotypes of science by recruiting young scientists.
Published in PLoS biology
Sterol-derived hormone(s) controls entry into diapause in Caenorhabditis elegans by consecutive activation of DAF-12 and...
Published in PLoS biology
Upon starvation or overcrowding, Caenorhabditis elegans interrupts its reproductive cycle and forms a specialised larva called dauer (enduring). This process is regulated by TGF-beta and insulin-signalling pathways and is connected with the control of life span through the insulin pathway components DAF-2 and DAF-16. We found that replacing cholest...
Mechanism of prion propagation: amyloid growth occurs by monomer addition.
Published in PLoS biology
Abundant nonfibrillar oligomeric intermediates are a common feature of amyloid formation, and these oligomers, rather than the final fibers, have been suggested to be the toxic species in some amyloid diseases. Whether such oligomers are critical intermediates for fiber assembly or form in an alternate, potentially separable pathway, however, remai...
DNA barcoding: promise and pitfalls.
Published in PLoS biology
Molecular signatures of proliferation and quiescence in hematopoietic stem cells.
Published in PLoS biology
Stem cells resident in adult tissues are principally quiescent, yet harbor enormous capacity for proliferation to achieve self renewal and to replenish their tissue constituents. Although a single hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) can generate sufficient primitive progeny to repopulate many recipients, little is known about the molecular mechanisms tha...
Open access as public policy.
Published in PLoS biology
Population history and natural selection shape patterns of genetic variation in 132 genes.
Published in PLoS biology
Identifying regions of the human genome that have been targets of natural selection will provide important insights into human evolutionary history and may facilitate the identification of complex disease genes. Although the signature that natural selection imparts on DNA sequence variation is difficult to disentangle from the effects of neutral pr...
A neuroeconomics approach to inferring utility functions in sensorimotor control.
Published in PLoS biology
Making choices is a fundamental aspect of human life. For over a century experimental economists have characterized the decisions people make based on the concept of a utility function. This function increases with increasing desirability of the outcome, and people are assumed to make decisions so as to maximize utility. When utility depends on sev...
Genomic insights into methanotrophy: the complete genome sequence of Methylococcus capsulatus (Bath).
...Published in PLoS biology
Methanotrophs are ubiquitous bacteria that can use the greenhouse gas methane as a sole carbon and energy source for growth, thus playing major roles in global carbon cycles, and in particular, substantially reducing emissions of biologically generated methane to the atmosphere. Despite their importance, and in contrast to organisms that play roles...
