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Mapping the Fitness Landscape of Gene Expression Uncovers the Cause of Antagonism and Sign Epistasis between Adaptive Mutations
(Public Library of Science, 2014)
How do adapting populations navigate the tensions between the costs of gene expression and the benefits of gene products to optimize the levels of many genes at once? Here we combined independently-arising beneficial ...
The Role of Muscle microRNAs in Repairing the Neuromuscular Junction
(Public Library of Science, 2014)
microRNAs have been implicated in mediating key aspects of skeletal muscle development and responses to diseases and injury. Recently, we demonstrated that a synaptically enriched microRNA, miR-206, functions to promote ...
Deletion of Prepl Causes Growth Impairment and Hypotonia in Mice
(Public Library of Science, 2014)
Genetic studies of rare diseases can identify genes of unknown function that strongly impact human physiology. Prolyl endopeptidase-like (PREPL) is an uncharacterized member of the prolyl peptidase family that was discovered ...
A Selective HDAC 1/2 Inhibitor Modulates Chromatin and Gene Expression in Brain and Alters Mouse Behavior in Two Mood-Related Tests
(Public Library of Science, 2013)
Psychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, are projected to lead global disease burden within the next decade. Pharmacotherapy, the primary – albeit often ineffective – treatment ...
A Sexually Conditioned Switch of Chemosensory Behavior in C. elegans
(Public Library of Science, 2013)
In sexually reproducing animals, mating is essential for transmitting genetic information to the next generation and therefore animals have evolved mechanisms for optimizing the chance of successful mate location. In the ...
Evolution after Introduction of a Novel Metabolic Pathway Consistently Leads to Restoration of Wild-Type Physiology
(Public Library of Science, 2013)
Organisms cope with physiological stressors through acclimatizing mechanisms in the short-term and adaptive mechanisms over evolutionary timescales. During adaptation to an environmental or genetic perturbation, beneficial ...
The Methanol Dehydrogenase Gene, mxaF, as a Functional and Phylogenetic Marker for Proteobacterial Methanotrophs in Natural Environments
(Public Library of Science, 2013)
The mxaF gene, coding for the large \((\alpha)\) subunit of methanol dehydrogenase, is highly conserved among distantly related methylotrophic species in the Alpha-, Beta- and Gammaproteobacteria. It is ubiquitous in ...
An Insulin-to-Insulin Regulatory Network Orchestrates Phenotypic Specificity in Development and Physiology
(Public Library of Science, 2014)
Insulin-like peptides (ILPs) play highly conserved roles in development and physiology. Most animal genomes encode multiple ILPs. Here we identify mechanisms for how the forty Caenorhabditis elegans ILPs coordinate diverse ...
Chromatin Modification by PSC Occurs at One PSC per Nucleosome and Does Not Require the Acidic Patch of Histone H2A
(Public Library of Science, 2012)
Chromatin architecture is regulated through both enzymatic and non-enzymatic activities. For example, the Polycomb Group (PcG) proteins maintain developmental gene silencing using an array of chromatin-based mechanisms. ...
Genetic Characterization of smg-8 Mutants Reveals No Role in C. elegans Nonsense Mediated Decay
(Public Library of Science, 2012)
The nonsense mediated decay (NMD) pathway degrades mRNAs bearing premature translation termination codons. In mammals, SMG-8 has been implicated in the NMD pathway, in part by its association with SMG-1 kinase. Here we use ...