Biological sciences articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Damaged lysosomes, the principal degradative organelles, can kill a cell. A stress-induced protein controls lysosome stability, providing a potential target to treat lysosome-related diseases and cancer.

    • Ibolya Horváth
    •  & László Vígh

  • News & Views |

    The curvature of cellular membranes is generated by proteins and lipids. A synthetic experimental system allows the interplay between protein- and lipid-generated bending mechanisms to be studied directly.

    • Michael M. Kozlov

  • News & Views |

    Detailed analyses of foot kinematics and kinetics in barefoot and shod runners offer a refined understanding of bipedalism in human evolution. This research will also prompt fresh studies of running injuries.

    • William L. Jungers

  • News Feature |

    Scientists are struggling to make sense of the expanding scientific literature. Corie Lok asks whether computational tools can do the hard work for them.

    • Corie Lok

  • News Feature |

    Alan Ashworth took a cancer drug from Petri dish to patients in near record speed. Daniel Cressey meets a biologist who is evangelical about translational research.

    • Daniel Cressey

  • Letter |

    Mammals are repelled by large concentrations of salts but attracted to low concentrations of sodium. In mice, the latter behaviour can be blocked by the ion channel inhibitor amiloride. Here, mice have been produced lacking the drug's target sodium channel, ENaC, specifically in taste receptor neurons. It is confirmed that sodium sensing, like the four other taste modalities (sweet, sour, bitter and umami), is mediated by a dedicated 'labelled line'.

    • Jayaram Chandrashekar
    • , Christina Kuhn
    •  & Charles S. Zuker

  • Letter |

    Heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) is a molecular chaperone which, by inhibiting lysosomal membrane permeabilization, promotes the survival of stressed cells. Hsp70 is now shown to stabilize lysosomes by binding to an anionic phospholipid, BMP, resulting in stimulation of acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) activity. Notably, the decreased ASM activity and lysosomal stability seen in patients with Niemann–Pick disease can be corrected by treatment with recombinant Hsp70.

    • Thomas Kirkegaard
    • , Anke G. Roth
    •  & Marja Jäättelä

  • Article |

    Age-associated changes in stem cell supportive niche cells are shown to deregulate normal haematopoiesis by causing haematopoietic stem cell dysfunction. Age-dependent defects in niche cells are systemically regulated and can be reversed by exposure to a young circulation or by neutralization of the conserved longevity regulator, insulin-like growth factor-1, in the marrow microenvironment.

    • Shane R. Mayack
    • , Jennifer L. Shadrach
    •  & Amy J. Wagers

  • Article |

    Mouse and human fibroblasts can be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state with a combination of four transcription factors. Here, mature differentiated cells are directed, via a combination of a few transcription factors (distinct from those described for generating iPS cells), to form functional neurons in vitro, without having to revert the fibroblasts to an embryonic state.

    • Thomas Vierbuchen
    • , Austin Ostermeier
    •  & Marius Wernig

  • Letter |

    Here the presence of melanosomes — characteristic bodies that give feathers their colour — is demonstrated in feathers and feather-like structures of fossil early birds and dinosaurs from the Early Cretaceous Jehol Group of China. Not only is it shown that the feather–like structures of dinosaurs such as Sinosauropteryx really are akin to feathers, it is also possible to speculate in an informed way about their colour.

    • Fucheng Zhang
    • , Stuart L. Kearns
    •  & Xiaolin Wang

  • Letter |

    The increasing cost of energy and concerns about the environment have emphasized the need to find new sources of fuel, with the microbial production of high-energy fuels a promising approach. Here, Escherichia coli is engineered to produce more complex biofuels — fatty esters (biodiesel), fatty alcohols and waxes — directly from simple sugars. Some cells are further engineered to express hemicellulases, a step towards producing these compounds directly from hemicellulose.

    • Eric J. Steen
    • , Yisheng Kang
    •  & Jay D. Keasling

  • Article |

    The γ-carboxylation of many blood coagulation factors relies on the generation of vitamin K hydroquinone by the enzyme vitamin K epoxide reductase (VKOR), of which the anticoagulant warfarin is an inhibitor. Here, the X-ray crystal structure of a bacterial homologue of VKOR is presented; the results have implications for the mechanism of action of mammalian VKOR and explain how mutations can cause warfarin resistance.

    • Weikai Li
    • , Sol Schulman
    •  & Tom A. Rapoport

  • Letter |

    Although humans have engaged in long-distance running either barefoot or with minimal footwear for most of human evolutionary history, the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. Here, runners who habitually run in sports shoes are shown to run differently to those who habitually run barefoot, with the latter often landing on the fore-foot rather than the rear-foot. This strike pattern may have evolved to protect from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by runners.

    • Daniel E. Lieberman
    • , Madhusudhan Venkadesan
    •  & Yannis Pitsiladis

  • News |

    The positioning of people's photos affects how attractive and powerful they seem to be.

    • Matt Kaplan

  • Letter |

    Echolocation is usually associated with bats. Many echolocating bats produce signals in the larynx, but a few species produce tongue clicks. Here, studies show that in all bats that use larynx-generated clicks, the stylohyal bone is connected to the tympanic bone. Study of the stylohyal and tympanic bones of a primitive fossil bat indicates that this species may have been able to echolocate, despite previous evidence to the contrary, raising the question of when and how echolocation evolved in bats.

    • Nina Veselka
    • , David D. McErlain
    •  & M. Brock Fenton

  • Letter |

    Animals use the Earth's magnetic field for orientation but the biophysical basis of this is unclear. The light-dependent magnetic sense of Drosophila melanogaster was recently shown to be mediated by the cryptochrome (Cry) photoreceptor; here, using a transgenic approach, the type 1 and 2 Cry of the monarch butterfly are shown to both function in the magnetoreception system of Drosophila, and probably use an unconventional photochemical mechanism.

    • Robert J. Gegear
    • , Lauren E. Foley
    •  & Steven M. Reppert

  • Letter |

    The extent of epigenetic reprogramming in mammalian primordial germ cells (PGCs) and in early embryos, and its molecular mechanisms, are poorly understood. DNA methylation profiling in PGCs now reveals a genome–wide erasure of methylation, with female PGCs being less methylated than male ones. A deficiency of the cytidine deaminase AID interferes with the genome–wide erasure of DNA methylation, indicating that AID has a critical function in epigenetic reprogramming.

    • Christian Popp
    • , Wendy Dean
    •  & Wolf Reik

  • Brief Communications Arising |

    • Sophie Brinster
    • , Gilles Lamberet
    •  & Claire Poyart

  • Letter |

    Although cyclin D1 is frequently overexpressed in human cancers, the full range of its functions in normal development and oncogenesis is unclear. Here, tagged cyclin D1 knock-in mouse strains are developed to allow a search for cyclin D1-binding proteins in different mouse organs using high-throughput mass spectrometry. The results show that, in addition to its established cell cycle roles, cyclin D1 has an in vivo transcriptional function in mouse development.

    • Frédéric Bienvenu
    • , Siwanon Jirawatnotai
    •  & Piotr Sicinski

  • Article |

    A defining focus of synthetic biology is the engineering of genetic circuits with predictive functionality in living cells. Here, a decade after the first synthesized genetic toggle switch and oscillator, an engineered gene network with global intercellular coupling is designed that is capable of generating synchronized oscillations in a growing population of cells.

    • Tal Danino
    • , Octavio Mondragón-Palomino
    •  & Jeff Hasty

  • Letter |

    Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are an important class of immune effector molecules which fight pathogen infections. AMP induction in Drosophila is regulated through the activation of the Toll and immune deficiency pathways; it is now shown that AMP activation can be achieved independently of these pathways by the transcription factor FOXO. In non-infected animals, AMP genes are activated in response to nuclear FOXO activity when induced by starvation.

    • Thomas Becker
    • , Gerrit Loch
    •  & Michael Hoch

  • Letter |

    If robustness is the opposite of evolvability, we might expect that a robust population would have difficulty adapting to environmental change; however, some studies have suggested that genetic robustness facilitates adaptation. Here, using a general population genetics model, mutational robustness is found to either impede or facilitate adaptation depending on the population size, the mutation rate and the structure of the fitness landscape.

    • Jeremy A. Draghi
    • , Todd L. Parsons
    •  & Joshua B. Plotkin

  • Letter |

    Group II chaperonins are present in eukaryotes and archaea and are essential mediators of cellular protein folding. This process is critically dependent on the closure of a built-in lid, which is triggered by ATP hydrolysis, but the structural rearrangements and molecular events leading to lid closure are unknown. Using cryo-electron microscopy, the structures of an archaeal group II chaperonin in the open and closed states are now reported, providing details of this mechanism.

    • Junjie Zhang
    • , Matthew L. Baker
    •  & Wah Chiu

  • Editorial |

    Contributions to and from basic science are the part of synthetic biology that most deserves celebration.

  • News & Views |

    Physics provides new approaches to difficult biological problems: a plausible mathematical model of how cilia and flagella beat has been formulated, but it needs to be subjected to rigorous experimental tests.

    • T. J. Mitchison
    •  & H. M. Mitchison

  • News & Views |

    The giant-panda genome is the first reported de novo assembly of a large mammalian genome achieved using next-generation sequencing methods. The feat reflects a trend towards ever-decreasing genome-sequencing costs.

    • Kim C. Worley
    •  & Richard A. Gibbs

  • News & Views |

    By synchronizing clocks, humans make more efficient use of their time and orchestrate their activities in different places. Bacteria have now been engineered that similarly coordinate their molecular timepieces.

    • Martin Fussenegger

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