This week’s articles highlight the development of hair and sweat glands in human skin, how calcium signals affect the sensitivity of a mouse’s whiskers, peptide hormone processing in plants, and conformational changes that enable bacteriorhodopsin to harvest energy from light.
DEVELOPMENT
How to grow hair or sweat glands
Mice and humans exploit the epithelial-mesenchymal circuitry in different ways to direct sweat gland or hair follicle generation.
NEUROSCIENCE
Now you feel it, now you don't
The threshold for perception is increased upon down-regulation of dendritic activity.
PLANT BIOLOGY
Prohormone processing by subtilases
Redundant proteases mediate the formation of a peptide signal for the abscission of floral organs in Arabidopsis.
STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY
Snapshots of bacteriorhodopsin
Time-resolved serial crystallography using an x-ray free electron laser reveals structural changes in bacteriorhodopsin.