June 2024
A puffed-up fugu is wrestling with a toad. The body of the fugu has numerous spots that look like insulin secretory granules and a nucleus-like pattern, just like the pancreatic β-cells. Perhaps triggered by the wrestling, the fugu's body releases insulin. Inspired by a review article in this journal (Izumi (2023). Multiple pathways and independent functional pools in insulin granule exocytosis. Genes Cells 28: 471-481, DOI: 10.1111/gtc.13029).
May 2024
It has been demonstrated that in Arabidopsis thaliana, the accumulation of the plant hormone jasmonic acid at the base of flowering petals turns on a gene expression cascade there, resulting in the activation of autophagy and vacuolar development, which in turn causes petal shedding (Furuta et al. (2024) Nat. Commun. 15: 1098, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45371-3). Perhaps in the future, we will be able to control the timing of the fall of the petals in other flowering plants, such as cherry blossoms, as we wish.