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In Parkinson’s disease, clumps of sticky proteins trigger inflammation in the brain, leading to neuronal death. Whitehead Institute’s Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch and colleagues have now found that a mutation causing these proteins to misfold and become sticky can also turn the brain’s immune cells from friends to foes, possibly accelerating the progression of the disease.

Whitehead Institute Member David Page and colleagues measured the effects of the sex chromosomes on two types of immune cells, gaining insights into the cell-type-specific effects of gene regulation by sex chromosome genes. Their work also explores the biological underpinnings of sex biases in immunity and autoimmune disease.

Sonia Boor is a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member Mary Gehring’s lab studying how to make the crop plant pigeon pea more resilient against climate change. We sat down with Sonia to learn more about her and her experiences in and out of the lab.

Whitehead Institute Member David Bartel and colleagues uncovered how small changes in the molecular machines that carry out RNA interference can lead to big differences in the efficacy of gene silencing. Their findings have implications for the design of gene-silencing therapeutics.