The Landscape of Blood Cancer Research Today-and Where the Field Is Headed.

This editorial integrates the views of Blood Cancer Discovery's editors-in-chief and scientific editors to explore the current and near-future landscape of the study of hematologic malignancies-from the most intriguing new developments in clinical and basic research to the greatest upcoming challenges and how they will be confronted.

Cryo-EM studies of NAIP-NLRC4 inflammasomes.

The NAIP-NLRC4 family of inflammasomes are components of the innate immune system that sound a molecular alarm in the presence of intracellular pathogens. In this chapter, we provide an in-depth guide to using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to investigate these inflammasomes, focusing especially on the techniques we used in our recent structural analysis of the NAIP5-NLRC4 inflammasome. We explain how to circumvent specific obstacles we encountered at each step, from sample preparation through data processing. The methods described here will be useful for further studies of the NAIP5-NLRC4 inflammasome and related supracomplexes involved in innate immune surveillance; they may also be useful for unrelated complexes that present similar issues, such as preferential orientations and compositional heterogeneity.

Barbara J. Meyer: 2018 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal.

The Genetics Society of America's (GSA) Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal honors researchers for lifetime achievement in genetics. The recipient of the 2018 Morgan Medal, Barbara J. Meyer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, is recognized for her career-long, groundbreaking investigations of how chromosome behaviors are controlled. Meyer's work has revealed mechanisms of sex determination and dosage compensation in Caenorhabditis elegans that continue to serve as the foundation of diverse areas of study on chromosome structure and function today, nearly 40 years after she began her work on the topic.

Mariana Wolfner: 2018 Genetics Society of America Medal.

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) Medal recognizes researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the field of genetics in the past 15 years. The 2018 GSA Medal has been awarded to Mariana Wolfner of Cornell University for her work on reproductive processes that occur around the time of fertilization. This includes characterization of seminal proteins in Drosophila melanogaster, which has uncovered a wealth of information about sexual conflict in evolution.

Job Dekker: 2018 Edward Novitski Prize.

The Genetics Society of America's (GSA) Edward Novitski Prize is awarded to researchers who have solved challenging problems in genetics through experiments that demonstrate exceptional creativity and ingenuity. Job Dekker of the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been selected for the 2018 award in recognition of his innovative approach to understanding chromosome interactions and nuclear organization. Among Dekker's contributions are the development of the now-ubiquitous approach of chromosome conformation capture and the discovery of topologically associating domains.

Philip Hieter: 2018 George W. Beadle Award.

The Genetics Society of America's (GSA) George W. Beadle Award honors individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the community of genetics researchers and who exemplify the qualities of its namesake. For his work fostering communication and collaboration among members of the many subfields of genetics, Philip Hieter of the University of British Columbia has been named 2018's recipient of the award. Among his contributions are many initiatives that aim to better link human and model organism geneticists, including the Canadian Rare Diseases Models and Mechanisms Network-a consortium that connects investigators who identify rare disease genes in humans to basic scientists who can study the genes in model organisms.

BioEYES: 2018 Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education.

The Genetics Society of America's Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education honors individuals who have made a significant and sustained impact on genetics education. The 2018 recipients are geneticist Steven Farber of the Carnegie Institution for Science and education expert Jamie Shuda of the University of Pennsylvania. Farber and Shuda were awarded the prize in recognition of their outreach program BioEYES, which provides students in grades 2-12 with hands-on biology experience using live zebrafish. The flagship program brings fish-and the tools to study them-into the classroom for an entire week, during which time students observe much of the fish's life cycle, from mating to the development of larvae.

The structural basis of flagellin detection by NAIP5: A strategy to limit pathogen immune evasion.

Robust innate immune detection of rapidly evolving pathogens is critical for host defense. Nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins function as cytosolic innate immune sensors in plants and animals. However, the structural basis for ligand-induced NLR activation has so far remained unknown. NAIP5 (NLR family, apoptosis inhibitory protein 5) binds the bacterial protein flagellin and assembles with NLRC4 to form a multiprotein complex called an inflammasome. Here we report the cryo-electron microscopy structure of the assembled ~1.4-megadalton flagellin-NAIP5-NLRC4 inflammasome, revealing how a ligand activates an NLR. Six distinct NAIP5 domains contact multiple conserved regions of flagellin, prying NAIP5 into an open and active conformation. We show that innate immune recognition of multiple ligand surfaces is a generalizable strategy that limits pathogen evolution and immune escape.

Cholesterol superlattice modulates CA4P release from liposomes and CA4P cytotoxicity on mammary cancer cells.

Liposomal drugs are a useful alternative to conventional drugs and hold great promise for targeted delivery in the treatment of many diseases. Most of the liposomal drugs on the market or under clinical trials include cholesterol as a membrane stabilizing agent. Here, we used liposomal CA4P, an antivascular drug, to demonstrate that cholesterol content can actually modulate the release and cytotoxicity of liposomal drugs in a delicate and predictable manner. We found that both the rate of the CA4P release from the interior aqueous compartment of the liposomes to the bulk aqueous phase and the extent of the drug's cytotoxicity undergo a biphasic variation, as large as 50%, with liposomal cholesterol content at the theoretically predicted C(r), e.g., 22.0, 22.2, 25.0, 33.3, 40.0, and 50.0 mol % cholesterol for maximal superlattice formation. It appears that at C(r), CA4P can be released from the liposomes more readily than at non-C(r), probably due to the increased domain boundaries between superlattice and nonsuperlattice regions, which consequently results in increased cytotoxicity. The idea that the increased domain boundaries at C(r) would facilitate the escape of molecules from membranes was further supported by the data of dehydroergosterol transfer from liposomes to MßCD. These results together show that the functional importance of sterol superlattice formation in liposomes can be propagated to distal targeted cells and reveal a new, to our knowledge, mechanism for how sterol content and membrane lateral organization can control the release of entrapped or embedded molecules in membranes.