Showing papers in "Current Biology in 2014"

TL;DR: It is argued that redox biology, rather than oxidative stress, underlies physiological and pathological conditions.

TL;DR: In empathy one feels with someone, but one does not confuse oneself with the other; that is, one still knows that the emotion one resonates with is the emotion of another, and if this self-other distinction is not present, the precursor of empathy that is already present in babies is spoken.

TL;DR: The results reveal that 10 Hz tACS increases parieto-occipital alpha activity and synchronizes cortical oscillators with similar intrinsic frequencies to the entrainment frequency, highlighting the causal role of alpha oscillations for visual perception.

TL;DR: It is found that prioritizing imperiled species by their evolutionary distinctness and geographic rarity is a surprisingly effective and spatially economical way to maintain the total evolutionary information encompassing the world's birds.

TL;DR: This review focuses on how small non-coding RNA molecules, termed microRNAs (miRNAs), can function as oncogenes or tumor suppressors, and how the misexpression of miRNAs and dysregulation of factors that regulate mi RNAs contribute to the tumorigenic process.

TL;DR: It is shown that dynamic facial expressions of emotion provide a sophisticated signaling system, questioning the widely accepted notion that emotion communication is comprised of six basic (i.e., psychologically irreducible) categories, and instead suggesting four.

TL;DR: The results reinforce the notion that, in the long term, research data cannot be reliably preserved by individual researchers, and further demonstrate the urgent need for policies mandating data sharing via public archives.

TL;DR: The authors investigated abundant and rare subcommunities of marine microbial eukaryotes, a crucial group of organisms that remains among the least-explored biodiversity components of the biosphere.

TL;DR: This study examines public goods-based syntrophic interactions between bacterial members of the human gut microbial ecosystem and finds evidence for a rich interaction network based on the breakdown and use of polysaccharides.

TL;DR: This work estimates the age of the crown-group hummingbird assemblage, investigates the timing and patterns of lineage accumulation for hummingbirds overall and regionally, and evaluates the role of Andean uplift in hummingbird speciation.

TL;DR: Current understanding of replication initiation and its regulation is reviewed, mechanisms by which activated oncogenes might interfere with these processes are described and how replicative stress might contribute to the genomic instability seen in cancers are discussed.

TL;DR: The results reveal how universal clock circuits can regulate tissue-specific rhythms and provide insights into the mechanism by which universal TFs can be modulated to drive tissue- specific programs of gene expression.

TL;DR: It is shown that tension-dependent stabilization of lamin-A,C and myosin-IIA can suitably couple nuclear and cell morphology downstream of matrix mechanics and is modeled as a parsimonious gene circuit.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that the public goods dilemma may be solved by two very different mechanisms: cells can produce thick biofilms that confine the goods to producers, or fluid flow can remove soluble products of chitin digestion, denying access to nonproducers.

TL;DR: Application of new genomic methods is likely to lead to the discovery of many additional supergenes in a broad range of organisms and reveal similar genetic architectures for convergently evolved phenotypes.

TL;DR: This study identifies a novel bidirectional interaction between synapses and astrocytes, in which synaptic activity and synaptic potentiation regulate PAP structural plasticity, which in turn determines the fate of the synapse.

TL;DR: The stability analysis shows that although significant positive epistasis is rare, many deleterious mutations are beneficial in at least one alternative mutational background, and the distribution of conditionally beneficial mutations throughout the domain demonstrates that the functional portion of sequence space can be significantly expanded by epistasis.

TL;DR: A size spectrum food web model that links the vulnerability of prey to predation with the structural complexity of a reef is developed and it is shown that nonlinearities can be explained by size-structured prey refugia that reduce mortality rates and alter growth rates in different parts of the size spectrum.

TL;DR: This study provides a quantitative analysis of the nuanced responses of species along a gradient of logging intensity, which could help inform evidence-based sustainable logging practices from the perspective of biodiversity conservation.

TL;DR: The study describes the diverse and abundant antibiotic resistance genes in nonclinical environments and shows that these genes are not randomly distributed among different environments (e.g., soil, oceans or human feces).

TL;DR: The general phylogeny and physiology of multiciliation is reviewed and the current understanding of the developmental and cellular events underlying the specification, differentiation and function of multiciliated cells in vertebrates is detailed.

TL;DR: The results indicate that the hippocampal formation contains representations of both the Euclidean distance and the path distance to goals during navigation, arguing that the hippocampus houses a flexible guidance system that changes how it represents distance to the goal depending on the fluctuating demands of navigation.

TL;DR: This work shows that an Arabidopsis mutant lacking the receptor-like kinase FERONIA (FER) shows severely altered Ca(2+) signaling and growth responses to different forms of mechanical perturbation, and proposes that FER-dependent mechanical signaling functions to regulate growth in response to external or intrinsic mechanical forces.

TL;DR: It is found that many proteins in the egg lack mRNA support and that many of these proteins are found in blood or liver, suggesting that they are taken up from the blood plasma, together with yolk, during oocyte growth and maturation, potentially contributing to early embryogenesis.

TL;DR: This work found that perception of face identity is systematically biased toward identities seen up to several seconds prior, even across changes in viewpoint, and provides the clearest evidence for the existence of an object-selective perceptual continuity field.

TL;DR: A meta-analysis of 42 European Mediterranean stocks of nine species in 1990-2010 shows that exploitation rate has been steadily increasing, selectivity has been deteriorating, and stocks have been shrinking, showing that stocks would be more resilient to fishing and produce higher long-term yields if harvested a few years after maturation.

TL;DR: The results demonstrate that the rise of birds was a complex process, and suggest that high rates of morphological evolution after the development of a novel body plan may be a common feature of macroevolution, as first hypothesized by G.G. Simpson more than 60 years ago.

TL;DR: The first systematic study of meaning in chimpanzee gestural communication is presented, which distinguishes a range of meanings, from simple requests associated with just a few gestures to broader social negotiation associated with a wider range of gesture types.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used two independent approaches to identify cortical actin nucleators: a proteomic analysis using cortex-rich isolated blebs, and a localization/small hairpin RNA (shRNA) screen searching for phenotypes with a weakened cortex or altered contractility.

TL;DR: It is found that locomotion influenced activity of V1 neurons with a characteristic laminar profile and shaped the population response by reducing pairwise correlations, reaching earlier processing stages than cortex.