A study in rats suggests that the mental replay of an experience is essential for making informed decisions. The work brings researchers closer to understanding how memories are represented and used by the brain.
This paper showed that FtsZ, a guanosine triphosphatase involved in bacterial cell division, is a new target for overcoming methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) resistance to β-lactam antibiotics. The authors showed that the FtsZ-specific inhibitor PC190723 acts synergistically with a β-lactam antibiotic to reduce infection
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a debilitating genetic disorder in which muscles gradually degenerate and for which there are no effective treatments. Now, a study in Nature suggests that increasing the expression of heat shock protein 72 (HSP72) with the nicotinic amidoxime derivative BGP-15
Motor cytoplasmic dynein is an ATPase that regulates ciliary trafficking, mitotic spindle formation and organelle transport. Firestone et al. described the discovery of the first specific small-molecule antagonists of cytoplasmic dynein, termed ciliobrevins. They showed that ciliobrevins modulate protein trafficking within primary cilia, which
Gerlinger et al. conducted whole-exome sequencing of biopsy samples taken from different tumour regions from patients with renal cell carcinoma. They showed that the individual tumours displayed extensive intratumour heterogeneity. For example, 63–69% of somatic mutations were not detectable across every tumour region, several
