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Collaboration is key to modern science, with major advances using multiple complementary approaches and dependent on sophisticated infrastructure. Yet science is also highly personal, as each person carves out a reputation and career. How does this work out in reality, and how can communities be built to benefit science and scientists?
Here we investigate the role of epigenetics in the formation, transcription regulation, maintenance and termination of several non-canonical chromatin structures. Using two examples, we demonstrate how studying non-canonical structures may reveal underlying mechanisms with implications for disease and propose intriguing epigenetic avenues for further exploration.
The concluding statement of Watson and Crick’s historic paper on the structure of DNA1 enshrines a key tenet of molecular mechanistic cell biology: “… the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”. Function — heredity in this case — is embedded in the redundant sequence information of the two strands of DNA. Although not always expressed as blatantly, the intimate dependence of cellular function on the mechanical level of macromolecules is inspirational. The devil is in the structural detail, and the painstaking quest for the correct details and their returns in the form of reliable knowledge knows no shortcuts.
As 2023 comes to an end, we take this opportunity to look back through the pages of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology and consider some of the year’s highlights.
DNA polymerase θ (POLQ) repairs mitotic DNA breaks; this requires RHINO and PLK1, averts genomic instability and may underlie effects of POLQ inhibitors in HDR-deficient cancer cells. We discuss recent work on mitotic DNA break processing and repair, the need for multiple DSB repair pathways and implications of therapeutic POLQ targeting in cancer.
In January 2024, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (NSMB) will celebrate the 30th anniversary of publishing its first issue. Though initially launched as Nature Structural Biology in 1994, the journal has since expanded its scope to include all research into the molecular underpinnings of life, with the vision that the broadest insight can be gleaned through a suite of complementary approaches.
Understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms of dosage compensation and how cells equalize gene expression from the sex chromosomes has interested scientists for more than six decades. However, with so many questions still unanswered, the field continues to capture the attention of researchers.
