Anel Mahmutovic David Fange Otto G Berg & Johan Elf. Lost in presumption: stochastic reactions in spatial models. Nature Methods 2012 9: 1163–1166.
Physical modeling is increasingly important for generating insights into intracellular processes. We describe situations in which combined spatial and stochastic aspects of chemical reactions are needed to capture the relevant dynamics of biochemical systems.
【Tools in Brief】Measuring phosphorylation-site stoichiometry. Nature Methods 2012 9:1144. et al. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 134 18201–18204 (2012).
Phosphorylation-site stoichiometry is important for understanding the functional implications of phosphorylation dynamics in the cell. However an apparent increase in phosphorylation for example could simply reflect an increase in concentration of the protein of interest under a changing biological condition. It is therefore important to normalize for protein expression but this has been challenging to do with standard western blotting. Pan et al. describe a functionalized water-soluble nanopolymer reagent dubbed pIMAGO which is used in conjunction with an antibody to measure protein phosphorylation levels with high quantitative accuracy; values are then normalized by protein concentration. pIMAGO contains titanium(IV) ions to capture phosphoproteins and infrared fluorescent dyes for high sensitivity detection. Applying pIMAGO in a microplate format Pan et al. monitored spleen tyrosine kinase phosphorylation in breast cancer cell lines.
Ertao Wang Sebastian Schornack John F. Marsh Enrico Gobbato Benjamin Schwessinger Peter Eastmond Michael Schultze Sophien Kamoun Giles E.D. Oldroyd. A Common Signaling Process that Promotes Mycorrhizal and Oomycete Colonization of Plants. Current Biology 2012 22(23): 2242-2246.
Summary
The symbiotic association between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi is almost ubiquitous within the plant kingdom [1] and the early stages of the association are controlled by plant-derived strigolacton
