In this News and Views article ($), Norman Sharpless and Ronald DePinho discuss bringing the tumor-suppressor gene p53 back to life. They tie together two Nature articles by lead authors Andrea Ventura and Wen Zue, and one by Carla Martins from Cell’s December issue. Since the pathway to tumor suppression is not damaged when p53 is turned off in cancerous cells, these papers conclude that restoring p53 leads to tumor regression and could be a cancer therapy.
A few pages later, Remco Sprangers and Lewis Kay report how they used NMR to study the 20S core particle of the proteasome. From this work, they gleaned a little bit more about how this large protein complex disposes of damaged and misfolded proteins.