We've got microRNAs galore in today's edition of Science.
A paper from Rooij et al. at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center used a cardiac-specific microRNA to show that the MHC gene regulates heart growth and stress-related gene expression.
Meanwhile, a paper out of Caltech (Chen et al.) looks at selfish elements in the Drosophila genome that rely on microRNAs to silence a particular gene for embryogenesis.
These papers, from Thai et al. at Harvard Medical School and from Rodriguez, Vigorito, et al. at Sanger and the Babraham Institute, describe the importance of a conserved microRNA in the mammalian immune system.
And if microRNAs aren't your thing, Ishii and colleagues from Keio University report on high-throughput, systems-level studies of genetic and environmental perturbations in E. coli. A perspective for this paper was written by Uwe Sauer et al. on the importance of full system views of organisms.
Â