Researchers at Spain's Universitat Pompeu Fabra show in a paper published online in advance in Nucleic Acids Research this week that a subset of genes dependent upon the transcription factor Pap1 "only require nuclear Pap1 for activation, whereas another subset of genes … do need oxidized Pap1 to form a heterodimer with the constitutively nuclear transcription factor Prr1." The Pompeu Fabra team adds that "the ability of Pap1 to bind and activate drug tolerance promoters is independent on Prr1, whereas its affinity for the antioxidant promoters is significantly enhanced upon association with Prr1," which suggests to the team that "the activation of both antioxidant and drug resistance genes in response to oxidative stress share a common inducer, H2O2, but alternative effectors."
In another paper published online in advance in Nucleic Acids Research, a team led by investigators at New Zealand's University of Otago compares the performance of three existing pipelines for aligning bisulphite converted sequencing reads, providing "provides guidance to advance sequence-based methylation data analysis for molecular biologists."
Finally, Anthony Bugaut and Shankar Balasubramanian at University of Cambridge discuss the roles of 5'-untranslated region RNA G-quadruplexes in translation regulation and targeting in a Nucleic Acids Research paper this week. In their review, Bugaut and Balasubramanian consider "progresses in the study of 5'-UTR RNA G-quadruplex-mediated translational control."