Sylvain Lapan and Peter Reddienat at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., this week report on the complete transcriptome of the eye of the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea. Writing in Cell Reports, Lapan and Reddienat show that transcription factor Ovo is required for eye formation in S. mediterranea and add that the "planarian eye expresses orthologs of eye disease genes."
Over in Molecular Cell, scientists at the University of Zurich discuss noncanonical mis-match repair, specifically how it may play a role in genomic instability and cancer.
In Cell Stem Cell, a team led by investigators at the University of Rochester in New York highlights what it calls cooperation response genes, which represent regulators of leukemia stem cell growth and survival. In its study, the Rochester-led team shows that "the CRG [cooperation response genes] expression profile can be used as a drug discovery tool for identification of compounds that selectively target the LSC [leukemia stem cell] population."
And in Cell Host and Microbe, an international team led by investigators at Georgia State University shows that a "transient inability to manage proteobacteria promotes chronic gut inflammation in TLR5-deficient mice." More specifically, the GSU-led team shows that "an innate immune deficiency can result in unstable gut microbiota associated with low-grade inflammation, and harboring proteobacteria can drive and/or instigate chronic colitis."