Epithelial mechanics are maintained by inhibiting cell fusion with age in Drosophila.

A characteristic of normal aging and age-related diseases is the remodeling of the cellular organization of a tissue through polyploid cell growth. Polyploidy arises from an increase in nuclear ploidy or the number of nuclei per cell. However, it is not known whether age-induced polyploidy is an adaption to stressors or a precursor to degeneration.

Binucleation ramps up gene expression meeting the physiological demands of an organism.

In this issue of PLOS Biology, van Rijnberk and colleagues show how polyploidy, via binucleation, enables Caenorhabditis elegans intestinal cells to ramp up gene expression supplying the oocytes with the necessary lipids for optimal organismal growth and reproductive fitness.

A Drosophila Model to Study Wound-induced Polyploidization.

Polyploidy is a frequent phenomenon whose impact on organismal health and disease is still poorly understood. A cell is defined as polyploid if it contains more than the diploid copy of its chromosomes, which is a result of endoreplication or cell fusion. In tissue repair, wound-induced polyploidization (WIP) has been found to be a conserved healing strategy from fruit flies to vertebrates.

Genome Sequences of Newly Isolated Mycobacteriophages Forming Cluster S.

We describe the genomes of two mycobacteriophages, MosMoris and Gattaca, newly isolated on Mycobacterium smegmatis The two phages are very similar to each other, differing in 61 single nucleotide polymorphisms and six small insertion/deletions. Both have extensive nucleotide sequence similarity to mycobacteriophage Marvin and together form cluster S.