Nature view
Research highlights from the NPG family of journals.
The trials of gene therapy
A
recent gene therapy clinical trial successfully reconstituted the immune systems
of children with X-linked severe combined immune deficiency — a triumph that
was later overshadowed by the development of leukaemia in two patients. In a review
available free online in this month's Nature Reviews Cancer, Donald Kohn
et al. ask what caused these patients to develop this cancer and discuss
what needs to be done to make gene-therapy vectors safer and more effective.
review
Occurrence of leukaemia following gene therapy of X-linked SCID
D.
B. KOHN, M. SADELAIN AND J. C. GLORIOSO
Nature Reviews Cancer 3,
477; July 2003
| Summary
| Full Text (HTML/PDF)
|
Watching the brain learn to read
Children
start to read by recognition of words based on visual features or context —
for example, the word 'stop' appears in a red octagonal sign. Older children progress
to using phonetic cues to decode words. Literate adults process words in clusters,
and identify unknown words by analogy with known ones. In the July issue of Nature
Neuroscience, Guinevere Eden and colleagues report discrete changes in brain
activity that correlate with these developmental changes in reading strategies.
Areas of the brain involved in mapping print to sound were found to mature early
in learning and continued to be involved in reading through adulthood. In contrast,
as reading ability progressed, activity decreased in regions of the brain involved
in form recognition — possibly reflecting proficient readers' greater reliance
on text as opposed to visual context.
article
Development of neural mechanisms for reading
P.
E. TURKELTAUB et al.
Nature Neuroscience 6, 767; July
2003
| Summary
| Full Text (HTML/PDF)
|
Probing for prions
Prion
diseases continue to make headlines as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)
appears on new continents, and chronic wasting diseases spread among deer and
elk populations of North America. These diseases remain untreatable and are difficult
to definitively diagnose before death. An important tool has been missing as researchers
and clinicians try to understand and attack prion diseases — a pathogen-specific
antibody. In July's Nature Medicine, Eustache Paramithiotis et al.
introduce a set of antibodies that selectively recognize the putative prion pathogen.
Byron Caughey reviews in a News and Views article.
article
A prion protein epitope selective for the pathologically
misfolded conformation
E. PARAMITHIOTIS et al.
Nature
Medicine 9, 893; July 2003
| Summary
| Full Text (HTML/PDF)
|
news and views
Probing for prions: recognizing misfolded PrP
B.
CAUGHEY
Nature Medicine 9, 819; July 2003
| Full
Text (HTML/PDF) |
Planning out proteins
Biology
has a long tradition of classification, the definition and naming of groups. In
an article in this month's Nature Reviews Genetics, Christos Ouzounis et
al. examine the structural and functional classifications of the protein universe,
providing an overview of the existing classification schemes, their features and
interrelationships. They suggest that more comparative analyses of the present
schemes are required to understand their limitations, and that a unified scheme
should be based on a natural classification approach.
review
Classification schemes for protein structure and function
C.
A. OUZOUNIS et al.
Nature Reviews Genetics 4, 508; July
2003
| Summary
| Full Text (HTML/PDF)
|