Pathological tau alters head direction signaling and induces spatial disorientation.

Disorientation is an early symptom of dementia, suggesting impairments in neural circuits responsible for head direction signaling. The anterodorsal thalamic nucleus (ADn) exhibits early and selective vulnerability to pathological misfolded forms of tau (ptau), a major hallmark of Alzheimer's disease and ageing. The ADn contains a high density of head direction (HD) cells; their disruption may contribute to spatial disorientation.

The case of the missing Ks: Base editor screen to assess cellular fitness at single lysines.

In this issue of Molecular Cell, Bao et al. set out to elucidate "functional lysines" in the genome using adenine base editors. The study reveals several cases of alteration of functions that previous canonical CRISPR-Cas9 screens were unable to detect.