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Volume 466 Issue 7310, 26 August 2010

Editorial

  • An investigation at Harvard University highlights the human cost of scientific misconduct.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

  • A coalition government could be what the country needs to make headway on an emissions policy.

    Editorial
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Research Highlights

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Journal Club

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News

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News Feature

  • Stymied in the search for genes underlying human neuropsychiatric diseases, some researchers are looking to dogs instead. David Cyranoski meets the geneticist's new best friend.

    • David Cyranoski
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Opinion

  • New Orleans's recovery five years on from Katrina is a harbinger of how climate change will drive a thicker wedge between the haves and the have-nots, says John Mutter.

    • John Mutter
    Opinion
  • National censuses and surveys are threatened around the world by high costs and low response rates. The demographic data they yield are too valuable to lose, warn Stephen E. Fienberg and Kenneth Prewitt.

    • Stephen E. Fienberg
    • Kenneth Prewitt
    Opinion
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Books & Arts

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News & Views

  • How many pairs of electrons and 'missing electrons' can sustain collective motion in a semiconductor? The limits of this electron–hole dance are found by probing the dance floor using ultrashort laser pulses.

    • Gregory D. Scholes
    News & Views
  • Coat proteins of vesicles involved in intracellular membrane trafficking have closely related molecular architectures. The structure of COPI extends known similarities, and strengthens the case for a common evolutionary origin.

    • Stephen C. Harrison
    • Tomas Kirchhausen
    News & Views
  • The means by which supermassive black holes form and grow have remained largely unclear. Numerical simulations show that the collision of massive galaxies can naturally lead to the creation of these objects.

    • Marta Volonteri
    News & Views
  • The retinoblastoma protein is essential for accurate DNA replication, and its loss is commonly associated with cancer. It emerges that this protein also regulates another stage of the cell cycle.

    • Giovanni Bosco
    News & Views
  • Aggregates and mutations of the proteins ataxin-2 and TDP-43 have been implicated in distinct neurodegenerative disorders. An interplay between these proteins is now reported for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

    • Clotilde Lagier-Tourenne
    • Don W. Cleveland
    News & Views
  • A game for three or more players called 'guess your neighbour's input' reveals common ground between classical and quantum physics — at the expense of more exotic, super-quantum, theories of nature.

    • Andreas Winter
    News & Views
  • Tumour viruses can cause cancer by altering gene expression and protein activity in the host cell. Tumour adenoviruses, however, seem to go to great lengths to ensure that one particular host cell protein, p53, is suppressed.

    • Kevin M. Ryan
    News & Views
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Analysis

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Article

  • These authors show that changes in seismic anisotropy with depth across the stable part of North America reveal the presence of two lithospheric layers. The top layer, which is chemically depleted, is 150 km thick under the ancient core of the continent and tapers out along its younger borders. The bottom of the lithosphere is relatively flat, in agreement with the presence of a thermal conductive root that subsequently formed around the depleted chemical layer.

    • Huaiyu Yuan
    • Barbara Romanowicz
    Article
  • The causes of the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are poorly understood, although the protein TDP-43 seems to be involved. These authors show that the polyglutamine-containing protein ataxin 2 interacts with TDP-43 and is a potent modifier of TDP-43 toxicity. Moreover, intermediate-length polyglutamine expansions in the ataxin 2 gene significantly associate with ALS. These data establish the ataxin 2 gene as a new and relatively common ALS disease susceptibility gene.

    • Andrew C. Elden
    • Hyung-Jun Kim
    • Aaron D. Gitler
    Article
  • Adenovirus E1B-55k targets transcription factor p53 for degradation and is thought to be critical for p53 inactivation during adenovirus replication. Indeed, mutant viruses lacking E1B-55k have been tested as viral cancer therapies selective for p53-positive tumours. These authors find another adenoviral protein, E4-ORF3, to inactivate p53 independently of E1B-55k by means of a chromatin-silencing mechanism that prevents access of p53 to its DNA target sites.

    • Conrado Soria
    • Fanny E. Estermann
    • Clodagh C. O’Shea
    Article
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Letter

  • Observations of distant quasars indicate that billion-solar-mass supermassive black holes existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, but models have struggled to explain this. These authors report simulations showing that mergers between massive protogalaxies produce the conditions for collapse into supermassive black holes. Merger-driven gas inflows give rise to a nuclear gas disk that funnels gas to a sub-parsec-scale cloud. Gravitational collapse of this cloud leads to the formation of a massive black hole.

    • L. Mayer
    • S. Kazantzidis
    • S. Callegari
    Letter
  • Rotational fission may explain the formation of pairs of asteroids that have similar heliocentric orbits but are not bound together. These authors report photometric observations of a sample of asteroid pairs revealing that the primaries of pairs with mass ratios much less than 0.2 rotate rapidly, near their critical fission frequency. In agreement with crucial predictions, they do not find asteroid pairs with mass ratios larger than 0.2, and as the mass ratio approaches 0.2 the primary period grows long.

    • P. Pravec
    • D. Vokrouhlický
    • A. Leroy
    Letter
  • The exciton state in semiconductors, where an electron and hole are paired, has been studied extensively, but the properties of exciton states involving three or more charged particles are largely unknown. These authors use a challenging spectroscopy technique to generate and characterize biexcitons, triexcitons and other, unbound, correlations in a gallium arsenide nanostructure. It was previously unknown whether triexcitons, which involve correlations between six particles, can exist at all.

    • Daniel B. Turner
    • Keith A. Nelson
    Letter
  • At the end of the last ice age, rising atmospheric CO2 levels coincided with a decline in radiocarbon activity, suggesting the release of highly radiocarbon-depleted CO2 from the deep ocean to the atmosphere. These authors present radiocarbon records of surface and intermediate-depth waters from two sediment cores and find an decrease in radiocarbon activity that precedes and roughly equals in magnitude the decrease in the atmospheric radiocarbon signal during the early stages of the glacial–interglacial climatic transition.

    • Kathryn A. Rose
    • Elisabeth L. Sikes
    • Howard J. Spero
    Letter
  • Many ecological systems have chaotic or near-chaotic dynamics. In such cases, it has proved difficult to test whether data fit particular models that might explain the dynamics, because the noise in the data make statistical comparison with the model impossible. This author has devised a statistical method for making such inferences, based on extracting phase-insensitive summary statistics from the raw data and comparing with data simulated using the model.

    • Simon N. Wood
    Letter
  • The deacetylase SIRT1 has been suggested to function in normal brain physiology, but it is not known whether it participates in higher-order brain functions. These authors demonstrate a role for SIRT1 in synaptic plasticity and memory formation, with activation enhancing synaptic strength and memory formation. These effects were regulated through a post-transcriptional mechanism involving CREB activation and miR-134 production. This interplay represents another mechanism of plasticity regulation with behavioural consequences.

    • Jun Gao
    • Wen-Yuan Wang
    • Li-Huei Tsai
    Letter
  • The retinoblastoma tumour suppressor protein pRb can suppress the activity of certain transcription factors and potentiate the activity of others, and has been shown to affect the differentiation of different cell lineages in vitro. These authors show that the Rb gene has a role in driving bone cell formation or brown adipose tissue formation in vivo.

    • Eliezer Calo
    • Jose A. Quintero-Estades
    • Jacqueline A. Lees
    Letter
  • Tail-anchored proteins have a single transmembrane domain at their carboxy termini and are post-translationally targeted to the endoplasmic reticulum via the cytosolic ATPase TRC40. These authors identify a conserved protein complex called Bat3 complex that is recruited to ribosomes, interacts with the transmembrane domain of newly released tail-anchored proteins and transfers them to TRC40 for subsequent targeting to the endoplasmic reticulum.

    • Malaiyalam Mariappan
    • Xingzhe Li
    • Ramanujan S. Hegde
    Letter
  • α-N-methylation is an unusual post-translational modification in which the amino-terminal residues of proteins are methylated. One example is the Ran guanine nucleotide-exchange factor, RCC1, which requires methylation for its association with chromatin. These authors describe the first α-N-methyltransferase, named N-terminal RCC1 methyltransferase (NRMT). They identify the NRMT recognition sequence and several new methylation targets, and demonstrate the importance of α-N-methylation for normal bipolar spindle formation and chromosome segregation.

    • Christine E. Schaner Tooley
    • Janusz J. Petkowski
    • Ian G. Macara
    Letter
  • TET1 is an enzyme that catalyses the conversion of 5-methylcytosine of DNA to 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, raising the possibility that it is involved in mediating DNA demethylation. These authors show that Tet1 is involved in mouse embryonic stem cell maintenance and specification of the inner cell mass. It is required to maintain both the expression of Nanog in embryonic stem cells and the Nanog promoter in a hypomethylated state, supporting a role for Tet1 in regulating DNA methylation.

    • Shinsuke Ito
    • Ana C. D’Alessio
    • Yi Zhang
    Letter
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Corrigendum

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Technology Feature

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Correction

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Technology Feature

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Careers and Recruitment

  • Despite increased efforts by universities, more and more scientists have to deal with the two-body problem, reports Karen Kaplan.

    • Karen Kaplan
    Careers and Recruitment
  • There is no universally accepted method for when and how to broach the two-body problem with recruiters. Karen Kaplan details the options.

    • Karen Kaplan
    Careers and Recruitment
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Futures

  • Information overload.

    • Martin Hayes
    Futures
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Brief Communications Arising

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Outlook

  • Parkinson's disease might have much in common with Alzheimer's disease, prion diseases and other protein-aggregation disorders. Jim Schnabel investigates.

    • Jim Schnabel
    Outlook
  • Alison Abbott explores the history of the first treatment for Parkinson's disease since its dramatic debut in the swinging sixties.

    • Alison Abbott
    Outlook
  • The lack of a good animal model is frustrating efforts to curb disease progression, explains M. Flint Beal.

    • M. Flint Beal
    Outlook
  • To have any hope of affecting the course of Parkinson's disease, early diagnosis is essential. Rachel Jones assesses progress so far.

    • Rachel Jones
    Outlook
  • The search is on for disease-modifying treatments for Parkinson's disease, but, as Ruth Williams discovers, developing a compound is only part of the problem.

    • Ruth Williams
    Outlook
  • Cell replacement, gene therapy, and electrical and optical stimulation for the brain — Kerri Smith looks to the future of Parkinson's disease therapies.

    • Kerri Smith
    Outlook
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Nature Outlook

  • Like the condition itself, advances in understanding and treating Parkinson's disease have come slowly yet inexorably. Finally, however, we might be near the tipping point. With prevalence predicted to exceed 8 million in the next 20 years, new ways to treat Parkinson's disease are urgently needed.

    Nature Outlook
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