Enabling yeast replication in extreme cold and heat

Open questions are whether life can be enabled in uninhabitable environments, and whether there is a limit to howmuch one can tune the speed of proliferation. Answering such questions has broad implications. It may reveal whether we can live in unforeseen habitats, whether we can slow down aging, and whether there are limits to lifespan. In this...

Slowest possible replicative life at frigid temperatures for yeast

Determining whether life can progress arbitrarily slowly may reveal fundamental barriers to staying out of thermal equilibrium for living systems. By monitoring budding yeast’s slowed-down life at frigid temperatures and with modeling, we establish that Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) and a global gene-expression speed quantitatively determine...

A parallel algorithm for ridge-penalized estimation of the multivariate exponential family from data of mixed types

Computationally efficient evaluation of penalized estimators of multivariate exponential family distributions is sought. These distributions encompass among others Markov random fields with variates of mixed type (e.g., binary and continuous) as special case of interest. The model parameter is estimated by maximization of the pseudo...

Yeasts collectively extend the limits of habitable temperatures by secreting glutathione

The conventional view is that high temperatures cause microorganisms to replicate slowly or die. In this view, microorganisms autonomously combat heat-induced damages. However, microorganisms co-exist with each other, which raises the underexplored and timely question of whether microorganisms can cooperatively combat heat-induced damages at...

Evaluation of Schink et al.: Having the Gem Shine through a Fog

One snapshot of the peer review process for “Death Rate of E. coli during Starvation Is Set by Maintenance Cost and Biomass Recycling” (Schink et al., 2019).

DNA origami scaffold for studying intrinsically disordered proteins of the nuclear pore complex

The nuclear pore complex (NPC) is the gatekeeper for nuclear transport in eukaryotic cells. A key component of the NPC is the central shaft lined with intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) known as FG-Nups, which control the selective molecular traffic. Here, we present an approach to realize artificial NPC mimics that allows controlling...