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Volume 520 Issue 7549, 30 April 2015

The amygdala is part of the brain important for emotional processing, handling stimuli that have either positive or negative associations � the good and the bad. Little is known about how amygdala neurons differentiate or compartmentalize these distinctions. Here, Kay Tye and colleagues identify the basolateral amygdala (BLA) as a site of divergence for circuits mediating positive and negative emotional or motivational responses. In studies in mice they find that neurons in the BLA projecting to fear or reward circuits undergo opposing changes in synaptic strength following fear or reward conditioning. Selective activation of neural populations causes, respectively, either negative or positive reinforcement. Transcriptome analysis reveals candidate genes that may mediate these functional differences. Cover art: Insil Choi.

Editorial

  • Initiatives to make genetic and medical data publicly available could improve diagnostics — but they lose value if they do not share with other projects.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

  • Scientists must stand up for marine parks if the value of the seas is to be recognized globally.

    Editorial
  • A newly discovered tiny dinosaur sported an intriguing structural accessory.

    Editorial
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World View

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Research Highlights

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Social Selection

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Seven Days

  • The week in science: Nepal quake’s devastating toll; malaria vaccine hopeful offers infants only small protection; why the US National Football League must pay out nearly US$1billion.

    Seven Days
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News

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Correction

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News Feature

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Comment

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Books & Arts

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Correspondence

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News & Views

  • Deletion of the TP53 gene, an event seen in colorectal cancers, often occurs with co-deletion of a gene that encodes an enzyme subunit governing gene transcription. This creates a vulnerability ripe for therapeutic development. See Letter p.697

    • James E. Bradner
    News & Views
  • Bacterial infections during pregnancy can cause fetal death. The identification of a cell-signalling pathway induced during infection that recruits dangerous immune cells to the placenta may open up avenues to prevent this.

    • Anna Bakardjiev
    News & Views
  • In parts of southeast Asia, malaria parasites are showing resistance to the active ingredient in artemisinin-based antimalarial drugs. Delineation of a cell-signalling pathway might help to explain this phenomenon. See Letter p.683

    • Jeremy Burrows
    News & Views
  • Antarctic ice-core data show that abrupt changes of climate in the Northern Hemisphere in the last glacial period preceded associated shifts in Antarctica by about 200 years — indicating an oceanic coupling process. See Letter p.661

    • Tas van Ommen
    News & Views
  • Atomically thin layers of semiconductors called transition-metal dichalcogenides have been grown uniformly on the square-centimetre scale — paving the way for the ultimate miniaturization of electronic applications. See Letter p.656

    • Tobin J. Marks
    • Mark C. Hersam
    News & Views
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Article

  • Combining neural manipulation in freely behaving animals, physiological studies and electron microscopy reconstruction in the Drosophila larva identifies a complex multilsensory circuit involved in the selection of larval escape modes that exhibits a multilevel multimodal convergence architecture.

    • Tomoko Ohyama
    • Casey M. Schneider-Mizell
    • Marta Zlatic
    Article
  • The structure of the human ribosome at high resolution has been solved; by combining single-particle cryo-EM and atomic model building, local resolution of 2.9 Å was achieved within the most stable areas of the structure.

    • Heena Khatter
    • Alexander G. Myasnikov
    • Bruno P. Klaholz
    Article
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Letter

  • A distinct hard-X-ray emission component is reported within the central four parsecs by eight parsecs of the Galaxy; this emission is more sharply peaked toward the Galactic Centre than is the surface brightness of the soft X-ray population, and all the interpretations of this emission pose significant challenges to our understanding of stellar evolution, binary formation and cosmic-ray production in the Galactic Centre.

    • Kerstin Perez
    • Charles J. Hailey
    • Andreas Zoglauer
    Letter
  • The bandgap of bilayer graphene can be tuned with an electric field and topological valley polarized modes have been predicted to exist at its domain boundaries; here, near-field infrared imaging and low-temperature transport measurements reveal such modes in gapped bilayer graphene.

    • Long Ju
    • Zhiwen Shi
    • Feng Wang
    Letter
  • A new chemical vapour deposition method enables transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers to be grown directly on insulating silicon dioxide wafers, demonstrating the possibility of wafer-scale batch fabrication of high-performance devices with TMD monolayers.

    • Kibum Kang
    • Saien Xie
    • Jiwoong Park
    Letter
  • A new ice core from West Antarctica shows that, during the last ice age, abrupt Northern Hemisphere climate variations were followed two centuries later by a response in Antarctica, suggesting an oceanic propagation of the climate signal to the Southern Hemisphere high latitudes.

    • Christo Buizert
    • Betty Adrian
    • Thomas E. Woodruff
    Letter
  • Nitrogen isotope ratios from rocks between 3.2 and 2.75 billion years old are most readily explained by biological nitrogen fixation, most probably using the metal molybdenum as a cofactor, showing that nitrogen fixation is at least 3.2 billion years old and suggesting that molybdenum was available to organisms long before the Great Oxidation Event.

    • Eva E. Stüeken
    • Roger Buick
    • Matthew C. Koehler
    Letter
  • A survey of epigenetic associations between serum immunoglobulin E concentrations indicating allergy and methylation at CpG islands in families and a population sample has revealed associations at 36 loci that harbour genes encoding proteins including eosinophil products and phospholipid inflammatory mediators.

    • Liming Liang
    • Saffron A. G. Willis-Owen
    • William O. C. M. Cookson
    Letter
  • Neurons in the basolateral amygdala projecting to canonical fear or reward circuits undergo opposing changes in synaptic strength following fear or reward conditioning, and selectively activating these projection-target-defined neural populations causes either negative or positive reinforcement, respectively.

    • Praneeth Namburi
    • Anna Beyeler
    • Kay M. Tye
    Letter
  • A new mechanism that plants use to combat begomoviruses—one of the most pathogenic groups of plant viruses, causing severe disease in major crops worldwide—is uncovered: plants inhibit the transcription of genes associated with the translational apparatus, thus causing a general reduction in protein synthesis.

    • Cristiane Zorzatto
    • João Paulo B. Machado
    • Elizabeth P. B. Fontes
    Letter
  • Artemisinins are key anti-malarial drugs, but artemisinin resistance has been increasing; this study identifies the molecular target of artemisinins as phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase and increase of the lipid product phosphatidylinositol-3-phosphate induces resistance in Plasmodium falciparum.

    • Alassane Mbengue
    • Souvik Bhattacharjee
    • Kasturi Haldar
    Letter
  • The authors show that a large fraction of tumour mutations is immunogenic and predominantly recognized by CD4+ T cells; they use these data to design synthetic messenger-RNA-based vaccines specific against tumour mutations, and show that these can reject tumours in mice.

    • Sebastian Kreiter
    • Mathias Vormehr
    • Ugur Sahin
    Letter
  • Genomic deletion of the tumour suppressor TP53 frequently includes other neighbouring genes, such as the POLR2A housekeeping gene that encodes a crucial RNA polymerase II subunit; suppression of POLR2A with α-amanitin or by RNA interference selectively inhibits the tumorigenic potential of cancer cells, and in mouse models of cancer, tumours can be selectively targeted with α-amanitin coupled to antibodies, suggesting new therapeutic approaches for human cancers.

    • Yunhua Liu
    • Xinna Zhang
    • Xiongbin Lu
    Letter
  • Sulfite-reducing microbes couple the reduction of sulfite to the generation of a proton motive force that sustains organismic growth; here, two X-ray crystal structures are solved of MccA, a c-type cytochrome enzyme with eight haem groups that catalyses the six-electron reduction of sulfite to sulfide at a novel haem–copper active site.

    • Bianca Hermann
    • Melanie Kern
    • Oliver Einsle
    Letter
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Corrigendum

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Feature

  • A burgeoning vaccine industry paves paths for scientists to spread their knowledge outside the laboratory.

    • Bryn Nelson
    Feature
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News

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Futures

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Outlook

  • China's investment in research and development (R&D) is second only to the United States. Here, we analyse the data to give a snapshot of how and where the money is spent.

    • Xiaole Ni
    Outlook
  • Growth in the science budget and in research output have been China's key attributes over the past few decades, but the focus is now on how to boost research quality.

    • Michelle Grayson
    Outlook
  • Nobel laureate Kurt Wüthrich is a Swiss biophysicist who works at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. In 2013, he was appointed as a professor at ShanghaiTech in China, where he is helping to build the institution's science faculty.

    • Monya Baker
    Outlook
  • The Chinese Academy of Sciences is changing the way it assesses its research. But finding the right balance in such a big organization is a tough job.

    • Huang Kun
    Outlook
  • David Sweeney, a director of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), outlines the importance of accurately assessing the benefits of academic research and the dividends it can bring.

    • Nic Fleming
    Outlook
  • Two women, 18 years apart, describe their experiences within China's research system. Chen Xiangmei (pictured, left) received her MD from Kitasato University, Tokyo, in 1986 and is now the director of the State Key Laboratory of Kidney Diseases of China at the PLA General Hospital in Beijing. Zeng Xuan (pictured, right) received her PhD in semiconductor physics from Fudan University, Shanghai, in 1997 and is now a professor at Fudan's School of Microelectronics.

    • Piao Li
    Outlook
  • Tensions between the old communist regime and modern market forces are hindering efforts to turn China's scientific discoveries into commercial advances.

    • Peng Tian
    Outlook
  • Materials scientist Anthony Cheetham, vice-president of Britain's Royal Society, outlines how China's approach to recruiting and funding scientists is driving steep increases in Chinese research productivity.

    • Nic Fleming
    Outlook
  • Despite the growth in science spending and research output in China, young researchers are struggling to prosper, says Chuan-Chao Wang.

    • Chuan-Chao Wang
    Outlook
  • Jin Dong-Yan is a virologist in the University of Hong Kong's department of biochemistry. With a bachelor's degree from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, a PhD from the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine in Beijing and a postdoctoral stint at the US National Institutes of Health, Jin benefits from the experience of working in vastly different research systems.

    • Felix Cheung
    Outlook
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Nature Outlook

  • As China's research system matures, so must its policies for evaluating scientists and scientific output. But, as with any process of rapid change, there are obstacles to overcome to stimulate the most rigorous and original science — and translate that into the most useful societal benefits.

    Nature Outlook
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