07/2020 - A micronutrient with major effects on cancer cell viability

Selenium is a micronutrient essential for the generation of selenoproteins, which function predominantly by detoxifying cellular reactive oxygen species. In this issue, Carlisle et al. describe a novel mechanism whereby perturbing selenium utilization via inhibition of SEPHS2, a component of the selenocysteine-biosynthesis pathway, results in selenide poisoning and cancer cell death.

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07/2020 - A Human Pluripotent Stem Cell-based Platform to Study SARS-CoV-2 Tropism and Model Virus Infection in Human Cells and Organoids

SARS-CoV-2 has caused the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need for physiological models to study SARS-CoV-2 infection using human disease-relevant cells. COVID-19 pathophysiology includes respiratory failure but involves other organ systems including gut, liver, heart, and pancreas. We present an experimental platform comprised of cell and organoid derivatives from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). […]

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07/2020 - Human Condensin I and II Drive Extensive ATP-Dependent Compaction of Nucleosome-Bound DNA

Structural maintenance of chromosomes (SMC) complexes are essential for genome organization from bacteria to humans, but their mechanisms of action remain poorly understood. Here, we characterize human SMC complexes condensin I and II and unveil the architecture of the human condensin II complex, revealing two putative DNA-entrapment sites. Using single-molecule imaging, we demonstrate that both […]

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06/2020 - Connected from the Outside: The Role of US Regions in Promoting the Integration of the European Research System

Considerable efforts have been deployed by the European Union to create an integrated Research & Development area. In this paper, we focus on the structure and evolution of the European collaboration network as reflected by patent data. We study patent networks representing collaborations between inventors located in different geographic areas. Existing studies seem to indicate […]

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06/2020 - O2S2 for the Geodata Deluge

We illustrate a fewrecent ideas of Object Oriented Spatial Statistics (O2S2), focusing on the problem of kriging prediction in situations where a global second order stationarity assumption for the random field generating the data is not justifiable or the space domain of the field is complex. By localizing the analysis through the Random Domain Decomposition […]

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