LanTERN: A Fluorescent Sensor That Specifically Responds to Lanthanides.

Lanthanides, a series of 15 f-block elements, are crucial in modern technology, and their purification by conventional chemical means comes at a significant environmental cost. Synthetic biology offers promising solutions. However, progress in developing synthetic biology approaches is bottlenecked because it is challenging to measure lanthanide binding with current biochemical tools.

A long-acting prolactin to combat lactation insufficiency.

Human infants are born to breastfeed. While 50% of lactating persons struggle to make enough milk, there are no governmentally-approved drugs to enhance lactation. Here, we engineer a variant of the naturally-occurring driver of lactation, the hormone Prolactin, to increase its serum half-life and produce a viable drug candidate.

A Putative Bet-Hedging Strategy Buffers Budding Yeast against Environmental Instability.

To grow and divide, cells must extract resources from dynamic and unpredictable environments. Many organisms use different metabolic strategies for distinct contexts. Budding yeast can produce ATP from carbon sources by mechanisms that prioritize either speed (fermentation) or yield (respiration).

The Quest for Stability during Times of Change.

Experimental tools that are designed to perturb biological functions are often used to understand how cells change over time. However, in two recent papers, Segall-Shapiro et al. (2018; in Nature Biotechnology) and Rullan et al.

Looking Beyond the Stop Sign: Cell-Cycle Checkpoints Reconsidered.

A quantitative approach that tunes DNA damage strength and observes cell-cycle kinetics in single, unperturbed cells yields a new framework for thinking about cell-cycle checkpoints.

An Explicit Source for Extrinsic Noise.

A new study by Sherman et al. introduces a rigorous way to treat extrinsic noise with theory, isolates its prominent sources in vivo, and sharpens our understanding of biological heterogeneity.

Tuning the activation threshold of a kinase network by nested feedback loops.

Determining proper responsiveness to incoming signals is fundamental to all biological systems. We demonstrate that intracellular signaling nodes can tune a signaling network's response threshold away from the basal median effective concentration established by ligand-receptor interactions. Focusing on the bistable kinase network that governs progesterone-induced meiotic entry in Xenopus oocytes, we characterized glycogen synthase kinase-3beta (GSK-3beta) as a dampener of progesterone responsiveness.

Herstatin, an autoinhibitor of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 tyrosine kinase, modulates epidermal growth factor signaling pathways resulting in growth arrest.

Herstatin is an autoinhibitor of the ErbB family consisting of subdomains I and II of the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (ErbB-2) extracellular domain and a novel C-terminal domain encoded by an intron. Herstatin binds to human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 and to the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), blocking receptor oligomerization and tyrosine phosphorylation. In this study, we characterized several early steps in EGFR activation and investigated downstream signaling events induced by epidermal growth factor (EGF) and by transforming growth factor alpha (TGF-alpha) in NIH3T3 cell lines expressing EGFR with and without herstatin.