July 19, 2006

NMD mutations in Arabidopsis

Last year, Hori and Watanabe published in Plant Journal that an Arabidopsis upf3 mutation is viable but leads to the accumulation of aberrantly spliced RNAs. Now, Yoine et al. have shown that UPF1 is essential for growth and that low-beta-amylase1, (lba1 ), a missense mutation in UPF1, causes pleiotropic effects related to sugar metabolism. There are lots of tools now to study nonsense-mediated decay in Arabidopsis.

July 06, 2006

Science Blogs

Nature on science blogs: "weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare," but they find five exceptions.

July 03, 2006

ESRs are complex -- comparative and experimental analysis from the Ast lab

A new paper from the Ast lab (Goren et al. 2006. "Comparative Analysis Identifies Exonic Splicing Regulatory Sequences -- The Complex Definition of Enhancers and Silencers" PubMed Molecular Cell) introduces the term ESR for exonic regulatory sequences and studies some of their properties. There are no surprises here, but the paper provides a key confirmation of the importance of position within the exon to ESR function.