In Nature today, a news piece reports that biology postgraduates in the United States face greater competition for tenure than ever before. Data compiled by FASEB shows that since 1981, the percentage of US biomedical PhDs with tenure or tenure-track jobs dropped from 45 percent to just below 30 percent. A related editorial bemoans the future prospects for many receiving doctoral degrees. A news feature details the findings of researchers at UCSF, who have recently published that a certain miRNA works not only to repress translation, but also to enhance it. Their work has the potential to open the field up, against the wishes of some of its founding "fathers," who question the results' validity. Biologists at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, have mapped out all the protein-protein interactions for the Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) pathway. Their research points out that all the major protein interactions for CME can be organized as a pathway protein "interactome," which allows one to identify the key "hubs" and where they work along the pathway. Â
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