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Volume 38 Issue 7, July 2006

Cover art: Fabric of Life Series #5 Matrix #1 by John Arabolos, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of New Haven http://arabolosart.com A nanowork from the Silvermine Guild Arts Center http://silvermineart.org/ Technical production by Jodi Pfister.

Volume 38 Issue 7

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Editorial

  • Preserving funding for a diversity of projects is key when NIH budgets are tight.

    Editorial

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Commentary

  • Three very recent reports provide convincing statistical evidence (P < 10−8), at a genome-wide level, of the association of common polymorphisms with three different common diseases: systemic lupus erythematosus (IRF5), prostate cancer and type 1 diabetes (IFIH1 region). This adds to the trickle—soon to be a flood—of disease association results that are highly unlikely to be false positives. There are other convincing examples in the last 12 months: age-related macular degeneration (CFH), type 1 diabetes (IL2RA, also known as CD25) and type 2 diabetes (TCF7L2). Given 20 years of a literature full of irreproducible results, what has changed?

    • John A Todd
    Commentary
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Book Review

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News & Views

  • Plants generate an amazing variety of small molecules and are arguably nature's finest chemists. A new study identifies over 2,000 small molecule mass peaks in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and defines both the genetic diversity and genetic architecture controlling the production of these compounds.

    • Ivan R Baxter
    • Justin O Borevitz
    News & Views

  • The proposal that a distinct subset of colorectal cancers show a marked propensity for promoter CpG island DNA methylation and associated gene silencing has been hotly debated. A new study takes an unbiased approach and not only strongly concludes that a CpG island methylator phenotype exists, but also offers new markers to define a concept that could teach much about the origins of cancer.

    • Kornel Schuebel
    • Wei Chen
    • Stephen B Baylin
    News & Views

  • A new study shows that the independent adaptation to a ruminant lifestyle in two leaf-eating monkeys relied on parallel amino acid substitutions in ribonuclease gene duplicates. This discovery suggests that, given similar initial conditions, proteins may repeatedly follow similar adaptive evolutionary paths.

    • Benjamin Prud'homme
    • Sean B Carroll
    News & Views

  • Acquired somatic mutations in the transcription factor GATA1 are a defining feature of acute megakaryocytic leukemia in children with Down syndrome. A new study shows that similar inherited GATA1 mutations do not promote leukemia in the absence of trisomy 21 but lead to defects in multiple hematopoietic lineages.

    • Gina Mundschau
    • John Crispino
    News & Views

  • Among the many neurodegenerative diseases caused by repeat expansions, spinocerebellar ataxia type 8 (SCA8) has been something of a puzzle. Now, a new study shows that the CTG/CAG expansion in ATXN8OS (formerly SCA8) is transcribed in both directions, raising the possibility that two molecular mechanisms contribute to disease.

    • Henry L Paulson
    News & Views
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Brief Communication

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Article

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Letter

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Technical Report

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Corrigendum

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Erratum

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