Foxes and shrews identified as potential carriers of SARS virus

Tokyo

In the frame: palm civets on sale in China's markets may have been the source of SARS. Credit: STR/AP

Foxes and hedge-shrews have been added to the list of animals that harbour the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in humans. The list also includes cats and ferrets, although the masked palm civet remains the prime suspect as the reservoir for the virus.

China's official news agency said that some foxes and hedge-shrews in Guangdong, where SARS first emerged in November 2002, had tested positive for the coronavirus that causes the disease.

In early 2004, the virus was traced to wild-animal markets in Guangdong that sold palm civets, prompting a cull of up to 4,000 animals. But the new report casts some doubt on the link between civets and transmission to humans. The province's SARS research team found that market workers who handled civets were less likely to show clinical signs of being exposed to the SARS virus than other workers.

Gravity probe struggles to get off the ground

Washington

A spacecraft designed to test Einstein's general theory of relativity missed its first launch window in California on 19 April. But several other windows, each only a second long, are planned for this week.

NASA's Gravity Probe B will orbit Earth's poles for about 16 months, looking for tiny gravitational distortions in the fabric of space, which Einstein's theory predicts should be caused by the mass of our planet. This test of general relativity will be 100 times more sensitive than any previous efforts, says Sasha Buchman, science mission manager for the experiment at Stanford University, California.

First proposed in 1959, the experiment has cost US$700 million, and has been threatened with cancellation numerous times. To detect the gravitational disturbances, the probe contains gyroscopes made with immense precision, which can measure movements of as a little as one hundred-thousandth of a degree. At the heart of each is a chunk of quartz the size of a ping-pong ball, milled to within 40 atomic layers of a perfect sphere. Each sphere is contained in a near-perfect vacuum with a pressure ten times less than the void of empty space. And the whole thing is cooled to −271 °C to prevent the equipment being affected by heat. Initial results are expected in 2006.

California rejects plan for drug-producing rice

San Diego

A proposal to begin commercial-scale growth of drug-producing transgenic rice in California suffered a setback last week when state officials declined to authorize the planting.

Ventria Bioscience of Sacramento had sought approval to plant 50 hectares of the rice on plots far from traditional rice fields in northern California (see Nature 428, 591; 200410.1038/428591b). The genetically modified rice produces the proteins lysozyme and lactoferrin, which can be used to treat a range of medical conditions. But officials at the state's food and agriculture department refused the request, saying that more public input was required along with an additional federal permit.

Ventria is also seeking permission to continue growing smaller experimental plots of the rice this spring.

Database provides active link for human genes

Tokyo

An international research team has pieced together one of the most comprehensive databases of human genes available. It contains information on more than 21,000 genes pooled from six existing collections of human complementary DNAs, the researchers report in a forthcoming issue of PLoS Biology (T. Imanishi et al. PLoS Biol. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0020162; 2004). That is two-thirds to three-quarters of the estimated total number of human genes.

Called the H-Invitational Database, the new resource carries information on active genes, including expression patterns in more than 60 human body tissues, predictions of the proteins they encode and the individual variations in genes that distinguish one person from another. Researchers can request many of the cDNAs by mail, and use them to study a gene's function themselves, says Takashi Gojobori, who led the project at the Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan in Mishima, Japan.

Although databases of genes are already available to scientists, this is the first time that active genes have been pulled together as one resource. The project took three years, and more genes will be added in the future.

→ www.jbirc.aist.go.jp/hinv/index.jsp

Europe backs bid to tailor antidepressants

London

The European Union has donated €9 million (US$10.8 million) to a study seeking to improve antidepressant prescription through genetic profiling.

The project, called GENDEP, will follow about 1,000 depressed patients in 13 European centres as they take one of two common antidepressant drugs. The study aims to help clinicians diagnose and manage patients with depression.

Researchers, led by Peter McGuffin from London's Institute of Psychiatry, will study changes in gene and protein expression and look to see if certain molecules are associated with a particularly good or bad clinical outcome.

Engineers bang their barge for bridge safety

Washington

Credit: D. BLANKENSHIP/UNIV. FLORIDA

Civil engineers this week are deliberately ramming a 635-tonne barge into a concrete support that formed part of an old bridge crossing Apalachicola Bay in Florida. But these are no carefree joy-riders — the stanchion is bristling with sensors that will gather data about the impact. Engineers believe that this will help them to design safer bridges.

The team plans to carry out about 12 collisions at speeds of up to 9 km per hour, and have already conducted seven crashes. “To the best of our knowledge, no one has done full-scale tests of barges striking bridges,” says Gary Consolazio of the University of Florida, who is lead engineer on the project. To see video footage of the crashes, visit http://www.nature.com/nsu/bridge