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Water is a crucial ingredient for life, but its level inside cells must be carefully regulated to maintain proper cell shape and size. In this week's issue of the open access journal PLoS Biology, scientists from the University of Gothenburg describe the highest resolution three-dimensional structure yet of a membrane protein, in this case of a protein channel known as an aquaporin that regulates water flow into and out of yeast cells. Virtually all living organisms use aquaporins to regulate...

By Liu, Jingjing Zhang, Yiyue; Qin, Genji; Tsuge, Tomohiko; Sakaguchi, Norihiro; Luo, Guo; Sun, Kangtai; Shi, Dongqiao; Aki, Shiori; Zheng, Nuoyan; Aoyama, Takashi; Oka, Atsuhiro; Yang, Weicai; Umeda, Masaaki; Xie, Qi; Gu, Hongya; Qu, Li-Jia Following meiosis, plant gametophytes develop through two or three rounds of mitosis. Although the ontogeny of gametophyte development has been defined in Arabidopsis thaliana, the molecular mechanisms regulating mitotic cell cycle progression are not...

Cells control mitosis (cell division) by assembling a biochemical switch to block it or by disassembling the switch to trigger it, according to investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the Technical University of Munich. The researchers found that when the switch called SCFNIPA is intact, levels of an enzyme called cyclin B1 drop, preventing the enzyme from activating a third protein called Cdk1. By blocking the interaction between cyclin B1 and Cdk1, SCFNIPA prevents the...