Publications by authors named "Victoria O Pokusaeva"
Article Synopsis
- Animals use compensatory actions, based on global visual motion cues called optic-flow, to maintain stability and efficiently navigate their surroundings.
- This study focuses on the fruit fly (Drosophila) to uncover specific neural circuits involved in visual course control, rather than relying solely on the simpler optomotor response traditionally studied in insects.
- The research reveals that electrical coupling between optic-flow-sensitive neurons, along with chemical synapses in the HS-H2 network, is crucial for proper navigation and turning behaviors, highlighting a new role for gap junctions in these processes.
Background: Biases of DNA repair can shape the nucleotide landscape of genomes at evolutionary timescales. The molecular mechanisms of those biases are still poorly understood because it is difficult to isolate the contributions of DNA repair from those of DNA damage.
Results: Here, we develop a genome-wide assay whereby the same DNA lesion is repaired in different genomic contexts.
Article Synopsis
- Understanding the fitness landscape is crucial for grasping how genetic information results in functional organisms, with this study examining the His3 gene involved in histidine synthesis in various species.
- Only 15% of amino acids in yeast His3 orthologues were consistently neutral, while the other 85% had fitness effects that varied based on the genetic context.
- About 67% of amino acid substitutions exhibited sign epistasis, showing different fitness impacts depending on the genetic background, contributing to a complex fitness landscape where many optimal paths are blocked.