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About the Cover
The seasonally frozen waters of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica (pictured with Mt Erebus smoking in the background) provide habitat for numerous species of endemic fishes, including the emerald notothen Trematomus bernacchii (inset). These cold-adapted fishes have both gained and lost many characteristics during their evolutionary histories. One example from T. bernacchii is the loss of the heat shock response, a cellular defense against thermal stress. Buckley et al. (pp. 3649-3656) examine several stages in the transcriptional regulation of the heat shock genes in this species and demonstrate that these genes, inducible by heat stress in nearly every other species on the planet, are expressed constitutively in T. bernacchii (inset graph). This may represent a need for expectedly high levels of protein chaperoning at low temperatures and an added cost of life in the cold.
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