Interkingdom networking within the oral microbiome

Different sites within the oropharynx harbour unique microbial communities. Co-evolution of microbes and host has resulted in complex interkingdom circuitries. Metabolic signalling is crucial to these processes, and novel microbial communication factors are progressively being discovered. Resolving interkingdom networks will lead to better understanding of oral health or disease aetiology.     

Coiled-coil networking shapes cell molecular machinery

The highly abundant α-helical coiled-coil motif not only mediates crucial protein–protein interactions in the cell but is also an attractive scaffold in synthetic biology and material science and a potential target for disease intervention. Therefore a systematic understanding of the coiled-coil interactions (CCIs) at the organismal level would help unravel the full spectrum of the biological function of this interaction motif and facilitate its application in therapeutics. We report the first identified genome-wide CCI network in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which consists of 3495 pair-wise interactions among 598 predicted coiled-coil regions. Computational analysis revealed that the CCI network is specifically and functionally organized and extensively involved in the organization of cell machinery. We further show that CCIs play a critical role in the assembly of the kinetochore, and disruption of the CCI network leads to defects in kinetochore assembly and cell division. The CCI network identified in this study is a valuable resource for systematic characterization of coiled coils in the shaping and regulation of a host of cellular machineries and provides a basis for the utilization of coiled coils as domain-based probes for network perturbation and pharmacological applications.     

New gelatin-based hydrogels via enzymatic networking

New types of hydrogels have been obtained starting from high bloom purified gelatin A, alone or in mixtures with hyaluronan and with a hyaluronan derivative bearing primary amino groups, by transglutaminase-catalyzed cross-linking. The reticulation process, carried out adopting two different temperature protocols, and the ensuing materials have been characterized in terms of rheologically estimated gel times, equilibrium swelling in water and in phosphate buffer solution (PBS), and rigidity modulus. Main structural and conformational factors governing the physicochemical properties and the possible application of the new hydrogels are discussed.     

Behavioural ecology: social networking for dullards

A recent paper shows that dull-plumaged male house finches can improve their mating success by moving to a different social network, where their plumage is brighter relative to that of other males.     

A thalamic reticular networking model of consciousness

[Background]  

It is reasonable to consider the thalamus a primary candidate for the location of consciousness, given that the thalamus has been referred to as the gateway of nearly all sensory inputs to the corresponding cortical areas. Interestingly, in an early stage of brain development, communicative innervations between the dorsal thalamus and telencephalon must pass through the ventral thalamus, the major derivative of which is the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN). The TRN occupies a striking control position in the brain, sending inhibitory axons back to the thalamus, roughly to the same region where they receive afferents.     

Computation emerges from adaptive synchronization of networking neurons

The activity of networking neurons is largely characterized by the alternation of synchronous and asynchronous spiking sequences. One of the most relevant challenges that scientists are facing today is, then, relating that evidence with the fundamental mechanisms through which the brain computes and processes information, as well as with the arousal (or progress) of a number of neurological illnesses. In other words, the problem is how to associate an organized dynamics of interacting neural assemblies to a computational task. Here we show that computation can be seen as a feature emerging from the collective dynamics of an ensemble of networking neurons, which interact by means of adaptive dynamical connections. Namely, by associating logical states to synchronous neuron's dynamics, we show how the usual Boolean logics can be fully recovered, and a universal Turing machine can be constructed. Furthermore, we show that, besides the static binary gates, a wider class of logical operations can be efficiently constructed as the fundamental computational elements interact within an adaptive network, each operation being represented by a specific motif. Our approach qualitatively differs from the past attempts to encode information and compute with complex systems, where computation was instead the consequence of the application of control loops enforcing a desired state into the specific system's dynamics. Being the result of an emergent process, the computation mechanism here described is not limited to a binary Boolean logic, but it can involve a much larger number of states. As such, our results can enlighten new concepts for the understanding of the real computing processes taking place in the brain.