Bei Zhang, PhD, Daniel K. Sodickson, MD, PhD, and Martijn A. Cloos, PhD, have teamed up to design a new glove-like MRI detector to visualize hands in action—bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and all! (Nature Biomedical Engineering, May 2018). Circumventing the electromechanical constraints of traditional MRI detectors, the new device captures the complexity of intricate soft-tissue mechanics in real-time. The technology brings new opportunities for the diagnosis and treatment of injuries and paves the way for the development of other wearable MRI devices, both for research purposes and clinical care.
 
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Richard Tsien, DPhil, and colleagues found that mice deficient for gamma-CaMKII, the calcium/calmodulin shuttle protein in excitatory neurons, have an impaired ability to form memories (Nature Communications, June 2018). Strikingly, the team demonstrated that a single point mutation in the shuttle gene, which has been linked to severe intellectual disability in humans, is sufficient to hinder learning in mice. The study provides the first evidence that calcium/calmodulin translocation supports learning and memory, and that its perturbation results in neuropsychiatric disease.

Just like highway congestion controls the flow of traffic, molecular crowding has important implications for the motion of particles inside of cells. Through the construction of a fluorescent self-assembled nanoparticles, Liam J. Holt, PhD, and colleagues have demonstrated that the mTORC1 pathway can modulate effective macromolecular diffusion coefficients by tuning intracellular ribosome concentrations (Cell, June 2018). Crowding by ribosomes also affects phase separation, which likely impacts many fundamental processes, such as cell division and signaling, and has already been linked to numerous human pathologies, including cancer, aging, and neurodegeneration.​

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