Opioid receptor antagonists increase hyperalgesia in humans and animals, indicating that endogenous activation of opioid receptors provides relief from acute pain; however, the mechanisms of long-term opioid inhibition of pathological pain have remained elusive. We found that tissue injury produced μ-opioid receptor constitutive activity (MORCA) that repressed spinal nociceptive signaling for months. Pharmacological blockade during the post-hyperalgesia state with MOR inverse agonists reinstated central pain sensitization, and precipitated hallmarks of opioid withdrawal (including cAMP overshoot and hyperalgesia) that required N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor activation of adenylyl cyclase type 1 (AC1). Thus, MORCA initiates both analgesic signaling as well as a compensatory opponent process that generates endogenous opioid dependence. Tonic MORCA suppression of withdrawal hyperalgesia may prevent the transition from acute to chronic pain.

Many diseases cause significant changes to the concentrations of small molecules (a.k.a. metabolites) that appear in a person’s biofluids, which means such diseases can often be readily detected from a person’s “metabolic profile"—i.e., the list of concentrations of those metabolites. This information can be extracted from a biofluids Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrum. However, due to its complexity, NMR spectral profiling has remained manual, resulting in slow, expensive and error-prone procedures that have hindered clinical and industrial adoption of metabolomics via NMR. This paper presents a system, BAYESIL, which can quickly, accurately, and autonomously produce a person’s metabolic profile. Given a 1D 1 H NMR spectrum of a complex biofluid (specifically serum or cerebrospinal fluid), BAYESIL can automatically determine the metabolic profile. This requires first performing several spectral processing steps, then matching the resulting spectrum against a reference compound library, which contains the “signatures” of each relevant metabolite. BAYESIL views spectral matching as an inference problem within a probabilistic graphical model that rapidly approximates the most probable metabolic profile. Our extensive studies on a diverse set of complex mixtures including real biological samples (serum and CSF), defined mixtures and realistic computer generated spectra; involving > 50 compounds, show that BAYESIL can autonomously find the concentration of NMR-detectable metabolites accurately (~ 90% correct identification and ~ 10% quantification error), in less than 5 minutes on a single CPU. These results demonstrate that BAYESIL is the first fully-automatic publicly-accessible system that provides quantitative NMR spectral profiling effectively—with an accuracy on these biofluids that meets or exceeds the performance of trained experts. We anticipate this tool will usher in high-throughput metabolomics and enable a wealth of new applications of NMR in clinical settings. BAYESIL is accessible at http://www.bayesil.ca.

Mitofusin 1 (MFN1) mediates mitochondrial fusion, but the mechanisms involved are unclear. Qi et al. present the crystal structures of a minimal GTPase domain of human MFN1, which suggest that MFN1 tethers apposing membranes through nucleotide-dependent dimerization.

Generation of the tubular endoplasmic reticulum (ER) network requires homotypic membrane fusion. This is mediated in metazoans by atlastin (ATL), a dynamin‐like GTPase that consists of an N‐terminal cytosolic domain followed by two transmembrane segments (TMs) and a C‐terminal tail (CT). A GTP‐hydrolysis‐induced conformational change in the N‐terminal cytosolic domain is required for fusion, but it is unclear if this alone is sufficient for the fusion reaction. Here, we show using in vitro fusion assays that the CT and TMs are required for efficient fusion. A conserved amphipathic helix in the CT promotes fusion by interacting with and perturbing the lipid bilayer. The TMs not only serve as membrane anchors but also mediate ATL oligomerization. Point mutations in the CT or the TMs also impair ATL's ability to maintain ER membrane morphology in vivo. Our results suggest that protein‐lipid and protein‐protein interactions in the membrane cooperate with the conformational change of the cytosolic domain to achieve fusion and maintain the tubular ER network. These findings are relevant to mechanisms used by other membrane fusion proteins, such as mitofusins/Fzo1p, viral fusogens, and SNAREs.

Chromosome segregation in mitosis is orchestrated by dynamic interaction between spindle microtubules and the kinetochore, a multiprotein complex assembled onto centromeric DNA of the chromosome. Here we show that Zwint-1 is required and is sufficient for kinetochore localization of Zeste White 10 (ZW10) in HeLa cells. Zwint-1 specifies the kinetochore association of ZW10 by interacting with its N-terminal domain. Suppression of synthesis of Zwint-1 by small interfering RNA abolishes the localization of ZW10 to the kinetochore, demonstrating the requirement of Zwint-1 for ZW10 kinetochore localization. In addition, depletion of Zwint-1 affects no mitotic arrest but causes aberrant premature chromosome segregation. These Zwint-1-suppressed cells display chromosome bridge phenotype with sister chromatids inter-connected. Moreover, Zwint-1 is required for stable association of CENP-F and dynamitin but not BUB1 with the kinetochore. Finally, our studies show that Zwint-1 is a new component of the mitotic checkpoint, as cells lacking Zwint-1 fail to arrest in mitosis when exposed to microtubule inhibitors, yielding interphase cells with multinuclei. As ZW10 and Zwint-1 are absent from yeast, we reasoned that metazoans evolved an elaborate spindle checkpoint machinery to ensure faithful chromosome segregation in mitosis.Chromosome movements during mitosis are governed by the interaction of spindle microtubules with a specialized chromosome domain located within the centromere. This specialized region, called the kinetochore (1, 2), is the site for spindle microtubule-centromere association. In addition to providing a physical link between chromosomes and spindle microtubules, the kinetochore has an active function in chromosomal segregation through microtubule motors and spindle checkpoint sensors located at or near it (3-5).Eukaryotic organisms require extraordinary fidelity in chromosome segregation during meiosis and mitosis as aberrant chromosome segregation can be catastrophic to an organism or its progeny. One of the evolutionarily conserved multiprotein complexes essential for the fidelity of chromosome segregation contains several proteins, including ZW10 1 (Zeste White 10) and ROD (Rough Deal) (6 -8). Mutations in the Drosophila ZW10 or ROD genes cause similar defects, most noticeably in lagging chromatids that remain at the metaphase plate late in anaphase, leading to high levels of aneuploidy among daughter cells.ZW10 and ROD proteins display remarkable dynamics in their intracellular location during cell division (7, 9, 10). Both proteins accumulate strongly at the outer kinetochore plates during prometaphase. At metaphase, ZW10 and ROD depart from the kinetochores and relocate onto spindle microtubules. During anaphase, the proteins are no longer found on kinetochore microtubules and instead localize exclusively to the kinetochores of the separating chromosomes.Besides binding to ROD, ZW10 is responsible for localization of cytoplasmic dynein to kinetochores (10 -12) via a direct contact with dynamitin, a...