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The award of a Nobel prize to an advisory body in the science of climate change rightly reflects the organization's many virtues, and should spur it on in its mission to assess and address global warming.
Genetic tests to detect cancer are feasible. But with researchers drowning in a sea of biomarkers and little financial incentive to get the tests on the shelves, the idea is floundering. Virginia Gewin reports.
Despite a training in clinical genetics, Hugh Rienhoff didn't know what was wrong with his daughter. So, as he tells Brendan Maher, he set about finding out.
The nitrogen cycle rarely features in the grim litany of things at risk from global warming. Nick Lane reports on research that might change this ? with grave consequences for ocean chemistry.
A personal DNA sequence is not yet practically useful. But it could be, argues Steven E. Brenner, if we had the right resources available to interpret genomes.
Scientific breakthroughs are reached through aesthetic, as well as scientific methods, argues a bioengineer, who is this week opening a culture centre to explore such creativity.
A South African cave overlooking the Indian Ocean was apparently a desirable residence for early humans. The site has provided rich evidence for the early use of colour and marine resources.
After the supercontinent of Gondwanaland broke up, the part that became India diverged especially swiftly from the other fragments. The explanation for this might lie in the loss of India's deep roots.
Long touted as a theory of everything, it seems that string theory may at last succeed as a theory of something very specific — the interactions of particles under the strong nuclear force.
Direct injection of proteins into host cells is one of the tricks bacteria use during infection. It seems that, to achieve this, the stomach pathogen Helicobacter pylori first grabs the cell by its surface receptors.
The mass of a black hole beyond our Galaxy has been calculated, thanks to the presence of an associated star. The hole is the weightiest yet, placing intriguing constraints on how this binary system developed.
A consortium reports the tripling of the number of genetic markers in Phase II of the International HapMap Project. This map of human genetic variation will continue to revolutionize discovery of susceptibility loci in common genetic diseases, and study of genes under selection in humans.
Integrins are cell adhesion receptors involved in a variety of signalling processes and are targeted by a number of bacterial and viral pathogens for adhesion or invasion. The gastric pathogen Helicobacter pylori's pilus protein CagL interacts with integrin, which subsequently triggers translocation and phoshorylation of the bacterial effector CagA.
Some proteins are degraded by a process called the N-end rule, in which a non-templated amino acid is added to the amino terminus as a marker for degradation. A set of crystal structures of the enzyme that promotes transfer of the amino acid along with the charged donor tRNA is solved in the presence or absence of target peptide. The results reveal that peptide bond formation occurs differently than on the ribosome.
Models of stellar evolution have difficulty producing black holes in close binaries with masses ten times that of the sun, which is consistent with the fact that the most massive stellar black holes known so far all have masses within one standard deviation of that. This paper report a mass of 15.65 ±1.45 times that of the sun for the black hole in the recently discovered system M 33 X-7, which is located in the nearby galaxy Messier 33.
As a superconducting thin film is made more disordered, or subject to an increasing magnetic field, a point is reached when the material undergoes a transition from a superconducting to an insulating state. Numerical simulations have been used to shed light on the nature of this transition, or, as it turns out, two types of transition.
The polarization of a ferroelectric material by an electric field can be used as the basis of a memory device. Recording a piece of information in this way involves increasing the size of a region with one polarity at the expense of those having the opposite polarity, and hence the movement of the domain walls separating these regions. This paper reports multi-scale simulations that reproduce the domain growth rates observed experimentally, and suggest a nucleation process that is energetically realistic.
Solar cells based on such coaxial nanowires made from silicon have been fabricated. Under a standard one solar equivalent (1-sun) illumination a maximum power output up to 200 pW per nanowire and an apparent energy conversion efficiency of up to 3.4% is achieved. Experiments demonstrate that such silicon nanowire photovoltaic elements can serve as robust power sources in nanoelectronic circuits.
Geochemical records from ocean sediment cores are used to shed light on the composition and ventilation of water in the deep North Pacific during the Last Glacial Maximum. A poorly-ventilated water mass that was rich in respired carbon dioxide occupied the North Pacific abyss during the Last Glacial Maximum, and that ventilation of the abyss increased during deglaciation, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Ethane, propane and butane are constituents of natural gas in anoxic marine sediments. The first microbial isolate belonging to the sulphate-reducing bacteria capable of anaerobically oxidizing short-chain non-methane hydrocarbons is described.
Determining the precise identity or origin of fragmentary fossils can be difficult. Here, mitochondrial DNA sequences are used to confirm that the skeleton of a child recovered in Uzbekistan in the 1930s was of Neanderthal origin and that remains from the Altai region of Siberia, much further east, are also Neanderthal, extending the Neanderthal range 2,000 km further east than previously assumed.
Evidence of shellfish use and cultural practice (use of red ochre) by Homo sapiens from a sea-cave in South Africa around 164,000 years ago presents the earliest evidence for the exploitation of coastal resources by some 40,000 years. At that time Africa was mostly desert, possibly driving small bands of hunter-gatherers seawards in search of new food sources
The genetic sex determination system is a rapidly evolving feature of the genome in many species. The master sex-determining gene moves frequently between chromosomes in some taxa, whereas in others more than one pair of chromosomes determines sex. This paper shows that these evolutionary patterns can result from genes with antagonistic effects: they can hijack sex determination from one chromosome to another.
Sabeti et al. build on their This paper builds on previous work of detecting selection on human genes, using the many more markers available in the Phase II HapMap project. Three examples of apparent population-specific selection based on geographic area are described, and how these may relate to human biology is discussed.
Plants and invertebrates can use RNA silencing as a protective mechanism in viral infection. Cellular microRNAs can have anti-viral activity also in mammalian cells, in this case by contributing to the antiviral effects of interferon beta against hepatitis C virus.
Structural details of mouse EHD2 are provided along with in vitro and in vivo assays, showing how an EHD oligomer is formed and how perpendicular curvature stresses on a membrane surface can result in remodelling of membranes by EHD oligomeric rings. The functional implications of the EHD2 structure for understanding of membrane deformation are also discussed.
Methylation of histone H3 on residue Lys4 (H3K4) contributes to transcription activation. Now it is shown that in budding yeast, an adjacent modification, methylated Arg2, can inhibit H3K4 methylation by preventing the binding of a methyl transferase complex.
The arginine methyltransferase PRMT6 is shown to methylate histone H3 on Arg2 in mammalian cells, and this modification is mutually antagonistic with methylation of Lys4 on H3 by the methyl transferase complex MLL.
With a variety of federal positions and a fledgling life-sciences sector, northern Virginia offers plenty of opportunities, from bench researcher to programme officer. Ted Agres reports.
Interactions between symbiotic or pathogenic microbes and the hosts they colonize are central to both health and disease. This rapidly advancing field is now bearing the fruits of interdisciplinary efforts by microbiologists, immunologists, cell biologists, geneticists and ecologists.
