I think this is destined to gain the thousand or so views of my reappointment talk. still, it would take a lot of globetrotting to give a seminar to 1000 people 50 at a time! I hope you like it (click here)
a very nice article from Bjorn Carey on our work analyzing the connection between growth and division in budding yeast
unexpectedly, Cln3 is not the answer...
Cell growth dilutes a cell cycle inhibitor, Whi5, while the cell cycle activator, Cln3, remains at constant concentration. When Whi5 is diluted below a critical concentration, cells enter the division cycle. Dilution of a cell cycle inhibitor is a new concept in cell biology and an elegant solution to the problem of coupling growth to division.
Read all about it here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14908.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20150924&spMailingID=49614214&spUserID=NDk5Njc4MjI2OTYS1&spJobID=763182077&spReportId=NzYzMTgyMDc3S0
This paper describes one way that spatial organization within the cell can be used to provide an entirely new feature for a network motif (in this case bistable switch from mutual inhibition of Cdk and Far1 activities). We expect that compartmentalization is frequently used to create stable protein pools that can be used to enhance cellular memory of past events (in this case exposure to mating pheromone). Read it, it is good.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415001981
The third in Andreas series of papers dismantling the interface between the pheromone-induced MAPK pathway and the cell cycle (see also Doncic et al 2011, 2013 also both Mol. Cell).
Amazing work by Andreas, Oguzhan and our collaborators from Estonian and Argentina.
just submitted a grant proposal with the following paragraph:
In this complex network view, most proteins in a cell are only separated from each other by only a few interactions. If many of these proteins contributed to a biological decision equally, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to understand how and why a certain extracellular signal results in a particular cellular decision. If everything is important, how can we simplify? Would our goal as researchers then be to draw a map where one mile is equivalent to one mile? Even though this is impossible, and the map will never be the territory, the genomics project is tantalizing in its increasingly complete and complex picture of the cell. Yet, fiction has already imagined the consequences of such maps and warns us that we may well be disappointed. One of Carroll’s characters concluded “we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well”, while Borges’ cartographers eventually also perceived their efforts useless, gave up, and watched their massive map fall into disarray.