TY - JOUR AB - Spatial regulation of the plant hormone indole-3-acetic acid (IAA, or auxin) is essential for plant development. Auxin gradient establishment is mediated by polarly localized auxin transporters, including PIN-FORMED (PIN) proteins. Their localization and abundance at the plasma membrane are tightly regulated by endomembrane machinery, especially the endocytic and recycling pathways mediated by the ADP ribosylation factor guanine nucleotide exchange factor (ARF-GEF) GNOM. We assessed the role of the early secretory pathway in establishing PIN1 polarity in Arabidopsis thaliana by pharmacological and genetic approaches. We identified the compound endosidin 8 (ES8), which selectively interferes with PIN1 basal polarity without altering the polarity of apical proteins. ES8 alters the auxin distribution pattern in the root and induces a strong developmental phenotype, including reduced root length. The ARF-GEF- defective mutants gnom-like 1 ( gnl1-1) and gnom ( van7) are significantly resistant to ES8. The compound does not affect recycling or vacuolar trafficking of PIN1 but leads to its intracellular accumulation, resulting in loss of PIN1 basal polarity at the plasma membrane. Our data confirm a role for GNOM in endoplasmic reticulum (ER) - Golgi trafficking and reveal that a GNL1/GNOM-mediated early secretory pathway selectively regulates PIN1 basal polarity establishment in a manner essential for normal plant development. AU - Doyle, Siamsa AU - Haegera, Ash AU - Vain, Thomas AU - Rigala, Adeline AU - Viotti, Corrado AU - Łangowskaa, Małgorzata AU - Maa, Qian AU - Friml, Jirí AU - Raikhel, Natasha AU - Hickse, Glenn AU - Robert, Stéphanie ID - 1569 IS - 7 JF - PNAS TI - An early secretory pathway mediated by gnom-like 1 and gnom is essential for basal polarity establishment in Arabidopsis thaliana VL - 112 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Grounding autonomous behavior in the nervous system is a fundamental challenge for neuroscience. In particular, self-organized behavioral development provides more questions than answers. Are there special functional units for curiosity, motivation, and creativity? This paper argues that these features can be grounded in synaptic plasticity itself, without requiring any higher-level constructs. We propose differential extrinsic plasticity (DEP) as a new synaptic rule for self-learning systems and apply it to a number of complex robotic systems as a test case. Without specifying any purpose or goal, seemingly purposeful and adaptive rhythmic behavior is developed, displaying a certain level of sensorimotor intelligence. These surprising results require no systemspecific modifications of the DEP rule. They rather arise from the underlying mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking,which is due to the tight brain body environment coupling. The new synaptic rule is biologically plausible and would be an interesting target for neurobiological investigation. We also argue that this neuronal mechanism may have been a catalyst in natural evolution. AU - Der, Ralf AU - Martius, Georg S ID - 1570 IS - 45 JF - PNAS TI - Novel plasticity rule can explain the development of sensorimotor intelligence VL - 112 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Epistatic interactions can frustrate and shape evolutionary change. Indeed, phenotypes may fail to evolve when essential mutations are only accessible through positive selection if they are fixed simultaneously. How environmental variability affects such constraints is poorly understood. Here, we studied genetic constraints in fixed and fluctuating environments using the Escherichia coli lac operon as a model system for genotype-environment interactions. We found that, in different fixed environments, all trajectories that were reconstructed by applying point mutations within the transcription factor-operator interface became trapped at suboptima, where no additional improvements were possible. Paradoxically, repeated switching between these same environments allows unconstrained adaptation by continuous improvements. This evolutionary mode is explained by pervasive cross-environmental tradeoffs that reposition the peaks in such a way that trapped genotypes can repeatedly climb ascending slopes and hence, escape adaptive stasis. Using a Markov approach, we developed a mathematical framework to quantify the landscape-crossing rates and show that this ratchet-like adaptive mechanism is robust in a wide spectrum of fluctuating environments. Overall, this study shows that genetic constraints can be overcome by environmental change and that crossenvironmental tradeoffs do not necessarily impede but also, can facilitate adaptive evolution. Because tradeoffs and environmental variability are ubiquitous in nature, we speculate this evolutionary mode to be of general relevance. AU - De Vos, Marjon AU - Dawid, Alexandre AU - Šunderlíková, Vanda AU - Tans, Sander ID - 1571 IS - 48 JF - PNAS TI - Breaking evolutionary constraint with a tradeoff ratchet VL - 112 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We consider the quantum ferromagnetic Heisenberg model in three dimensions, for all spins S ≥ 1/2. We rigorously prove the validity of the spin-wave approximation for the excitation spectrum, at the level of the first non-trivial contribution to the free energy at low temperatures. Our proof comes with explicit, constructive upper and lower bounds on the error term. It uses in an essential way the bosonic formulation of the model in terms of the Holstein-Primakoff representation. In this language, the model describes interacting bosons with a hard-core on-site repulsion and a nearest-neighbor attraction. This attractive interaction makes the lower bound on the free energy particularly tricky: the key idea there is to prove a differential inequality for the two-particle density, which is thereby shown to be smaller than the probability density of a suitably weighted two-particle random process on the lattice. AU - Correggi, Michele AU - Giuliani, Alessandro AU - Seiringer, Robert ID - 1572 IS - 1 JF - Communications in Mathematical Physics TI - Validity of the spin-wave approximation for the free energy of the Heisenberg ferromagnet VL - 339 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We present a new, simpler proof of the unconditional uniqueness of solutions to the cubic Gross-Pitaevskii hierarchy in ℝ3. One of the main tools in our analysis is the quantum de Finetti theorem. Our uniqueness result is equivalent to the one established in the celebrated works of Erdos, Schlein, and Yau. AU - Chen, Thomas AU - Hainzl, Christian AU - Pavlović, Nataša AU - Seiringer, Robert ID - 1573 IS - 10 JF - Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics TI - Unconditional uniqueness for the cubic gross pitaevskii hierarchy via quantum de finetti VL - 68 ER -