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Long dismissed as too expensive or impractical, mining the sea floor for metals is gaining a new foothold. Mark Schrope reports on two companies hoping to take the plunge.
Wealthy philanthropists and private foundations are supporting biomedical research on a grand scale. Meredith Wadman asks what they get for their money.
Donations from philanthropists and private foundations are increasingly finding their way into biomedical research. Lucy Odling-Smee takes a look at some of the richest and most influential funders.
Flush with Microsoft's fortune, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest charitable foundation in the United States. Tadataka Yamada, executive director of its Global Health Program, tells Lucy Odling-Smee how the organization aims to save lives with its wealth.
In mammals, most wounds heal by repair, not regeneration. It now seems that, as they heal, open skin wounds in adult mice form new hair follicles that follow similar developmental paths to those of embryos.
A material with a cunningly designed optical response overcomes a fundamental limit to image resolution. This 'hyperlens' produces magnified images of objects smaller than the wavelength of the imaging light.
The capture–recapture technique is a mainstay of ecology. This principle has been applied with individual genotyping to estimate how many accidentally killed minke whales reach the markets of South Korea.
For decades, silicon has been the dominant material for conventional, charge-based electronics. A new twist makes silicon ripe to enter the domain of spintronics, where the new currency is electron spin.
The process of SUMOylation affects various cellular events by modifying the proteins involved. In neurons, it controls receptor numbers on the cell surface, thereby regulating neuronal communication.
There is a long way to go before artificial enzymes can reproduce the functions of the real things. The advent of systems that generate and respond to signals may bring that ideal a step closer.
In flowering plants, viable seeds result even without two of the mechanisms that normally operate during embryogenesis. This finding illuminates the interplay of male and female factors in the process.
Two modelling studies provide complementary descriptions of how gravitational forces might help to form the plumes of water vapour that spout from cracks in Enceladus, one of Saturn's icy moons.
Enceladus, a small icy satellite of Saturn, has active plumes jetting from localized fractures (‘tiger stripes’) within an area of high heat flux near the south pole. Nimmo et al. show that the most likely explanation is shear heating by tidally driven lateral (strike-slip) fault motion with a displacement of about 0.5 metres over a tidal period: vapour produced by this heating may escape as plumes through cracks reopened by the tidal stresses.
Plumes of gas have been seen near the south polar region of Enceladus, a small icy satellite of Saturn, and observations revealed large rifts in the crust, informally called ‘tiger stripes’. Hurford et al. report that during each orbit, every portion of each tiger stripe rift spends about half the time in tension, which allows the rift to open, exposing volatiles, and allowing eruptions: plume activity is expected to vary periodically.
Coherent spin transport in silicon has remained elusive despite its theoretically very long spin lifetime, which would make it an ideal material for spintronics applications. Appelbaum et al. have designed a radical device that avoids previous experimental problems by using the principle of hot-electron filtering through ferromagnetic thin films for both spin-injection and detection, and succeed in demonstrating coherent spin transport across a silicon channel of 10 micrometres across.
High temperature processing and applications of self-assembled layers of short molecules on and between surfaces were thought to be limited owing to desorption and/or degradation of the molecules. Here Gandhi and colleagues demonstrate high levels of adhesion at an interface between copper and silica, through the high temperature processing of a self-assembled molecular nanolayer at the interface beyond the molecular desorption temperature: strengthening this particular interface is of practical importance in microelectronics, but the study also demonstrates the potential of high temperature processing and applications of such nanolayers at interfaces more generally.
Inclusions from melt trapped in early crystallizing phenocrysts can be used to infer the composition of partial melts at depth, and it has been assumed that incompatible elements in olivine- and chromite-hosted melt inclusions are chemically isolated. Spandler and co-authors now show that this is not so: the fluxes of rare-earth elements through olivine and chromite are sufficiently rapid at magmatic temperatures to re-equilibrate completely over time periods that are short compared to those estimated for the production and ascent of mantle-derived magma.
Three sampling expeditions of the Southern Ocean provide the first description of its tremendous biodiversity, including 585 isopod species new to science, and clarifies patterns of species dispersion. Previously this ocean was not thought to be particularly rich.
Contributions from both parents are usually needed to produce viable offspring, in plants as well as animals. Nowack et al. explore the pathways controlling this process in plants by producing seeds containing only maternal endosperm— only possible when certain FIS class mutations are present in the maternal line — that grow into viable but smaller plants.
The mammalian hair follicle was thought to form only during development, so loss of an adult follicle was considered permanent. Here Cotsarelis and colleagues solve a fifty-year-old debate, and show that wounding the skin of adult mice triggers de novo hair follicle regeneration.
Hooking proteins to SUMO moieties is known to regulate key functions in the cell’s nucleus. This paper shows, for the first time, that SUMO controls the turnover of a neurotransmitter receptor — the kainate receptor: this work suggests that SUMO may target numerous other proteins working at junctions between nerve cells, thus probably contributing to key brain functions.
Barton et al. show that persisting infection with either gammaherpesvirus 68 or murine cytomegalovirus protects mice against subsequent bacterial infection. The authors argue that the co-evolution of mouse and virus provides a survival benefit not only to the virus but also to the host.
CagA is the main virulence factor of Helicobacter pylori and is delivered directly by the bacterium into epithelial cells where it interferes with cell signalling. Here Hatekeyama and colleagues show that CagA binds to the polarity protein, PAR1, inhibiting its phosphorylation and disrupting epithelial cell polarity: this study provides the first molecular link between a human pathogen and the PAR cell polarity machinery.
In higher eukaryotes, during mitosis the nuclear transport system Ran organises spindle formation, but in yeast, such targets for Ran had not yet been identified. Here Sato and Toda show that in fission yeast, the microtubule-associated protein Alp7/TACC is a critical target for Ran and contributes to spindle formation.
Although RNA is used to synthesize DNA by specialized enzymes such as reverse transcriptase and telomerase, it has never been shown to be used directly in DNA repair. Here Resnick and colleagues find that short RNA oligonucleotides which are complementary to the sequences at a DNA double-strand break can serve as a template for repair by the normal replicative DNA polymerases, suggesting that information contained in an RNA molecule could be transferred into the genome.
Here the authors report the X-ray structure of the vancomycin biosynthetic oxygenation enzyme DpgC — a key enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway of an important class of antibiotics — complexed with a bound substrate mimic. The structure confirms the absence of cofactors in the active site, and electron density consistent with molecular oxygen is present adjacent to the site of oxidation on the substrate, shedding light on the detailed mechanism of cofactor-independent oxygenases.
