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Volume 525 Issue 7569, 17 September 2015

To tackle the challenges facing society � energy, water, climate, food, health � scientists and social scientists must work together. Yet research that transcends traditional academic boundaries is still unfashionable and poorly rewarded. This special issue of Nature examines what governments, funders, journals, universities and academics must do to make interdisciplinary work a joy rather than a curse. Cover: Dean Trippe

Editorial

  • Relationships between industry and researchers can be hard to define, but universities and other institutions must do more to scrutinize the work of their scientists for conflicts of interest.

    Editorial

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  • Interdisciplinary science must break down barriers between fields to build common ground.

    Editorial
  • All involved in animal research must ensure that rules for ethical experiments are observed.

    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

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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

  • Memories are stored in the complex network of neurons in the brain. With the help of innovative tools to manipulate the connections between neurons, memories in mice can now be erased with a beam of light. See Article p.333

    • Ju Lu
    • Yi Zuo
    News & Views
  • Many catalysts comprise metal nanoparticles on solid supports. The discovery that single atoms of palladium anchored to a solid support also exhibit high catalytic activity might help to conserve the supply of this and related rare metals.

    • John Meurig Thomas
    News & Views
  • Research on guppies provides evidence that phenotypic plasticity — an organism's ability to alter its characteristics in response to changes in the environment — can both constrain and facilitate adaptive evolution. See Letter p.372

    • Juha Merilä
    News & Views
  • Chemotherapy-resistant cancer stem cells make it hard to cure many forms of the disease. Repositioning an existing drug to tackle this problem could significantly improve treatment for one form of leukaemia. See Letter p.380

    • Tessa Holyoake
    • David Vetrie
    News & Views
  • X-ray images of cuprate superconductors reveal the fractured, defect-riddled backbone on which superconductivity develops. The results take us a step closer to understanding how supercurrent flows on small spatial scales. See Letter p.359

    • Erica W. Carlson
    News & Views
  • Estimates of worldwide deaths associated with exposure to fine particles in atmospheric pollution provide some surprising results. The findings will guide future research and act as a wake-up call for policymakers. See Letter p.367

    • Michael Jerrett
    News & Views
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Article

  • A new light-activated probe that targets recently active neuronal spines for manipulation induces shrinkage of recently potentiated spines following a motor learning task; spine shrinkage disrupted learning, suggesting a causal relationship between the specific subset of targeted spines and the learned behaviour.

    • Akiko Hayashi-Takagi
    • Sho Yagishita
    • Haruo Kasai
    Article
  • Using biochemical fractionation and mass spectrometry, animal protein complexes are identified from nine species in parallel, and, along with genome sequence information, complex conservation is investigated and over one million protein–protein interactions are predicted in 122 eukaryotes.

    • Cuihong Wan
    • Blake Borgeson
    • Andrew Emili
    Article
  • This study describes a new model of eukaryotic replication termination in which converging leading strands pass each other unhindered and the replicative DNA helicase is unloaded late, after all strands have been ligated.

    • James M. Dewar
    • Magda Budzowska
    • Johannes C. Walter
    Article
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Letter

  • The amplitude and sinusoid-like shape of the optical variability of the light curve of PG 1302-102 is best fitted by relativistic Doppler boosting of emission from a compact, steadily accreting, unequal-mass binary, which is consistent with archival ultraviolet data, and suggests the existence of a binary black hole in the relativistic regime.

    • Daniel J. D'Orazio
    • Zoltán Haiman
    • David Schiminovich
    Letter
  • Exceptional points are singularities in non-Hermitian systems that can produce unusual effects, and it is shown that a Dirac cone in a photonic crystal can generate a continuous ring of exceptional points through flattening the tip of the cone.

    • Bo Zhen
    • Chia Wei Hsu
    • Marin Soljačić
    Letter
  • Experimentally transplanting guppies to evolve in a novel, predator-free environment reveals that the direction of plasticity in gene expression is usually opposite to the direction of adaptive evolution; that is, those genes whose expression changes are disadvantageous are more strongly selected upon than those whose changes are advantageous.

    • Cameron K. Ghalambor
    • Kim L. Hoke
    • Kimberly A. Hughes
    Letter
  • Although imatinib gives good clinical results in chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), residual disease attributed to quiescent CML stem cells remains in many patients; here glitazones are shown to reduce the pool of CML stem cells and achieve lasting disease eradication in CML patients in combination with imatinib.

    • Stéphane Prost
    • Francis Relouzat
    • Philippe Leboulch
    Letter
  • Splicing factors such as BUD31 are identified in a synthetic-lethal screen with cells overexpressing the transcription factor MYC; oncogenic MYC leads to an increase in pre-mRNA synthesis, and spliceosome inhibition impairs the growth and tumorigenicity of MYC-dependent breast cancers, suggesting that spliceosome components may be potential therapeutic targets for MYC-driven cancers.

    • Tiffany Y.-T. Hsu
    • Lukas M. Simon
    • Thomas F. Westbrook
    Letter
  • The Tus–Ter termination site of Escherichia coli is not completely efficient in stopping DNA replication, with about half of replisomes bypassing this blockade; here the speed of the replication machinery is shown to determine the outcome of the encounter between the replisome and Tus–Ter.

    • Mohamed M. Elshenawy
    • Slobodan Jergic
    • Samir M. Hamdan
    Letter
  • This study demonstrates a role for the Integrator complex in the stimulus-dependent induction of eRNAs and their 3′ processing; together with previously known roles of Integrator in transcription elongation and RNA processing, these results indicate that Integrator has broad functions in the regulation of eukaryotic gene expression.

    • Fan Lai
    • Alessandro Gardini
    • Ramin Shiekhattar
    Letter
  • The crystal structure of the large GTPase dynamin tetramer is presented, suggesting a mechanism by which oligomerization of dynamin is regulated, and revealing how mutations that interfere with tetramer formation and autoinhibition are of relevance to understanding the congenital muscle disorders Charcot–Marie–Tooth neuropathy and centronuclear myopathy.

    • Thomas F. Reubold
    • Katja Faelber
    • Susanne Eschenburg
    Letter
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Technology Feature

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Feature

  • A toxic relationship between junior scientist and adviser can quickly turn career prospects sour.

    • Chris Woolston
    Feature
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Q&A

  • A young scientist who helped to uncover the gene-editing technology CRISPR starts his own lab.

    • Virginia Gewin
    Q&A
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Correction

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Futures

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Brief Communications Arising

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