Flamingo participates in multiple models of cell competition.

The growth and survival of cells with different fitness, such as those with a proliferative advantage or a deleterious mutation, is controlled through cell competition. During development, cell competition enables healthy cells to eliminate less fit cells that could jeopardize tissue integrity, and facilitates the elimination of pre-malignant cells by healthy cells as a surveillance mechanism to prevent oncogenesis. Malignant cells also benefit from cell competition to promote their expansion.

Using Human-Centered Design to Improve Serious Illness Care for Older Adults With Advanced Dementia.

Context: Older adults with advanced dementia increasingly receive potentially non-beneficial, high-intensity life-sustaining treatments and goal-discordant care in the United States. Interventions to address this issue have shown limited success.

Objectives: To use human-centered design (HCD) with clinicians caring for older adults with advanced dementia to develop intervention ideas to reduce high-intensity, goal-discordant treatments near the end of life.

Cryo-EM phase-plate images reveal unexpected levels of apparent specimen damage.

Apoferritin (apoF) is commonly used as a test specimen in single-particle electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM), since it consistently produces density maps that go to 3 Å resolution or higher. When we imaged apoF with a laser phase plate (LPP), however, we observed more severe particle-to-particle variation in the images than we had previously thought to exist. Similarly, we found that images of ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (rubisco) also exhibited a much greater amount of heterogeneity than expected.

Cluster Assembly Dynamics Drive Fidelity of Planar Cell Polarity Polarization.

The planar cell polarity (PCP) signaling pathway polarizes epithelial cells in the tissue plane by segregating distinct molecular subcomplexes to opposite sides of each cell, where they interact across intercellular junctions to form asymmetric clusters. The role of clustering in this process is unknown. We hypothesized that protein cluster size distributions could be used to infer the underlying molecular dynamics and function of cluster assembly and polarization.