One strategy for advancing induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology toward the clinic is to replace the reprogramming genes with small molecules. Huangfu et al. show that the histone deacetylase inhibitor valproic acid can substitute for the reprogramming gene Klf4, allowing human iPS cells to be generated with only two transgenes, Oct4 and Sox2.

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Fruit-specific overexpression of a pair of snapdragon transcription factors produces tomatoes that uniformly accumulate anthocyanins at levels unprecedented for metabolic engineering. When included as a dietary supplement, the purple tomatoes increase the life spans of tumorigenic p53 knockout mice.

Chechik et al. define activity motifs, which extend the concept of a network motif from the static to the dynamic realm. Mapping functional data onto network structure enables them to reveal new systems-level principles describing how yeast cells integrate exogenous signals and use transcriptional regulation to optimize metabolic responses to environmental perturbations.