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Volume 462 Issue 7274, 10 December 2009

Most of the excitatory neurotransmissions in the central nervous system, - the events that allow neurons to 'talk' to each other - are mediated by ionotropic glutamate receptors that act by opening a transmembrane ion channel upon binding glutamate, and Eric Gouaux and colleagues this week report the crystal structure of the homotetrameric AMPA-subtype rat GluA2 receptor bound to a competitive antagonist. [Image by Alexander Sobolevsky using PyMOL (DeLano Scientific LLC)]

Authors

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Editorial

  • Iran's institutions must investigate allegations of scientific plagiarism as a matter of urgency.

    Editorial
  • Animal-research policies should be guided by moral consensus, not by arbitrary decisions.

    Editorial
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Research Highlights

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Journal Club

    • Katherine H. Freeman
    Journal Club
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News

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News Feature

  • The United Nations Climate Change Conference is mainly a political affair but it has drawn hundreds of scientists to the Danish capital. Jeff Tollefson finds out what they hope to gain.

    • Jeff Tollefson
    News Feature
  • How do you persuade philanthropists to pay $1 million for every pathogenic human virus you discover? Anjali Nayar talks to 'virus hunter' Nathan Wolfe in Cameroon to find out.

    • Anjali Nayar
    News Feature
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Correspondence

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Opinion

  • Seed banks must collect and condition their holdings of wild species so that they can thrive in landscapes transformed by climate change, say Jeffrey Walck and Kingsley Dixon.

    • Jeffrey Walck
    • Kingsley Dixon
    Opinion
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Books & Arts

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News & Views

  • In snails, manipulating the orientation of cells in the early embryo alters the left–right asymmetry of the shell and body. These findings refine the search for the symmetry-breaking event in this and other animals.

    • Nipam H. Patel
    News & Views
  • Astronomers know little about γ-ray bursts other than that they are the most energetic explosions in the Universe. The latest observations indicate that large-scale magnetism contributes to their power.

    • Maxim Lyutikov
    News & Views
  • Ion channels opened by glutamate mediate fast cell-to-cell information transfer in the nervous system. The structure of a full-length tetrameric glutamate receptor is both confirmatory and revelatory.

    • Lonnie P. Wollmuth
    • Stephen F. Traynelis
    News & Views
  • A phase transition of Earth's most abundant mineral occurs at pressures and temperatures corresponding to those thought to exist just above Earth's core. New experiments shed light on this enigmatic D′′ region.

    • Kanani K. M. Lee
    News & Views
  • The differing origins of gut dendritic cells — white blood cells that modulate immune responses — may explain how the intestinal immune system manages to destroy harmful pathogens while tolerating beneficial bacteria.

    • Sophie Laffont
    • Fiona Powrie
    News & Views
  • Membrane-bound protein channels that allow only urea to pass through are vital to the kidney's ability to conserve water. Crystal structures show that the channels select urea molecules by passing them through thin slots.

    • Mark A. Knepper
    • Joseph A. Mindell
    News & Views
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News and Views Q&A

  • The advent of sophisticated analytical tools enables the collective behaviour of networks of interacting molecules to be studied. The emerging field of systems chemistry promises to allow such networks to be designed to perform complex functions, and might even shed light on the origins of life.

    • Jonathan R. Nitschke
    News and Views Q&A
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Article

  • Mutations in the enzyme cytosolic isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 (IDH1) are commonly found in glioblastomas, a major subset of primary human brain cancers. However, only a single copy of the gene is mutated, suggesting that the mutation does not result in a simple loss of function. Here, IDH1 mutations are shown to act in a gain-of-function manner, resulting in a new ability of the enzyme to catalyse α-ketoglutarate to R(-)-2-hydroxyglutarate, an onco-metabolite.

    • Lenny Dang
    • David W. White
    • Shinsan M. Su
    Article
  • The majority of excitatory neurotransmission in the central nervous system is mediated by ionotropic glutamate receptors, which function by opening a transmembrane ion channel upon binding of glutamate. However, despite this crucial role in neurobiology, the architecture and atomic structure of an intact isotropic glutamate receptor are unknown. The X-ray crystal structure of the rat GluA2 receptor in complex with a competitive antagonist is now reported and analysed.

    • Alexander I. Sobolevsky
    • Michael P. Rosconi
    • Eric Gouaux
    Article
  • Specialized urea transporters have evolved to achieve rapid and selective urea permeation in the mammalian kidney, a process ultimately necessary for water re-absorption. Here, the X-ray crystal structure of a functional urea transporter from the bacterium Desulfovibrio vulgaris is presented and analysed; the results establish that the urea transporter operates by a channel-like mechanism and reveal the physical and chemical basis of urea selectivity.

    • Elena J. Levin
    • Matthias Quick
    • Ming Zhou
    Article
  • In living systems, the repair of genotoxic damage requires that the lesion first be detected in an excess of undamaged DNA. A base-excision DNA repair enzyme, MutM, is now captured and structurally elucidated at the stage of initial encounter with a damaged nucleobase within a DNA duplex. By combining structural biology and computational modelling, the pathway by which this encounter causes the damaged nucleobase to be extruded from the DNA duplex is defined.

    • Yan Qi
    • Marie C. Spong
    • Gregory L. Verdine
    Article
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Letter

  • The nature of the jets and the role of magnetic fields in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) remain unclear. There are two possible models, one of which suggests that magnetic fields are critical; to distinguish between these models the degree of polarization in early-time emission must be measured. The early optical emission from GRB 090102 is now reported to be polarized at 10 ± 1 per cent, indicating the presence of large-scale fields originating in the expanding fireball.

    • I. A. Steele
    • C. G. Mundell
    • C. Guidorzi
    Letter
  • Cosmic rays are believed to be mainly accelerated by the winds and supernovae of massive stars, although definite evidence for this is lacking. The active regions of starburst galaxies have exceptionally high rates of star formation, and therefore should produce cosmic rays that interact with interstellar gas and radiation to produce diffuse γ-rays. The detection and analysis of >700-GeV γ-rays from M82, the prototype small starburst galaxy, now links cosmic-ray acceleration to star formation activity.

    • V. A. Acciari
    • E. Aliu
    • B. Zitzer
    Letter
  • All hard, convex shapes pack more densely than spheres, although for tetrahedra this was demonstrated only very recently. Here, tetrahedra are shown to pack even more densely than previously thought. Thermodynamic computer simulations allow the system to evolve naturally towards high-density states, showing that a fluid of hard tetrahedra undergoes a first-order phase transition to a dodecagonal quasicrystal, and yielding the highest packing fractions yet observed for tetrahedra.

    • Amir Haji-Akbari
    • Michael Engel
    • Sharon C. Glotzer
    Letter
  • 5.33 million years ago, in an event known as the Zanclean flood, Atlantic waters refilled a mostly desiccated Mediterranean Sea which had become disconnected from the world's oceans; however, the nature, abruptness and evolution of this flood remain poorly constrained. Using borehole and seismic data and a model study, it is now suggested that 90 per cent of the water was transferred in a short period of a few months to two years, with peak rates of sea level rise in the Mediterranean possibly reaching more than 10 metres per day.

    • D. Garcia-Castellanos
    • F. Estrada
    • R. De Vicente
    Letter
  • Seismic detectability of the boundaries and convection in the mantle is strongly influenced by the thicknesses and Clapeyron slopes of mantle phase boundaries. The unusually large positive Clapeyron slope found for the boundary between perovskite and post-perovskite (the 'pPv boundary') would destabilize high-temperature anomalies in the lowermost mantle, in disagreement with the seismic observations. Here, new studies of the thickness and Clapeyron slope of the pPv boundary shed light on this matter.

    • Krystle Catalli
    • Sang-Heon Shim
    • Vitali Prakapenka
    Letter
  • Male animals are typically more elaborately ornamented than females, probably because females make more of an energetic investment in raising young. However, this generality may not apply in cooperatively breeding vertebrates, where the energetic load is similar in males and females. The socially diverse African starlings are now used to study this issue, revealing that where intrasexual competition among females may be intense, female trait elaboration is selected for.

    • Dustin R. Rubenstein
    • Irby J. Lovette
    Letter
  • Most animals display internal and/or external left–right asymmetry. The gastropod Lymnaea stagnalis has both sinistral and dextral snails within a species; the chirality is hereditary, but the gene(s) and mechanisms for handedness-determination are not yet identified. In L. stagnalis, the chiral blastomere arrangement at the eight-cell stage is now shown to determine left–right asymmetry throughout development, acting upstream of the Nodal signalling pathway.

    • Reiko Kuroda
    • Bunshiro Endo
    • Miho Shimizu
    Letter
  • The atomic ratio of carbon:nitrogen:phosphorus can be used to describe biota in terms of elemental composition, and this stoichiometry is fundamental for understanding the production dynamics and biogeochemical cycles of ecosystems. Heterotrophic microbial communities from terrestrial soils and fresh-water sediments are now shown to share a common functional stoichiometry in relation to organic nutrient acquisition, reflecting the similar scaling relationships of four key ecoenzymes.

    • Robert L. Sinsabaugh
    • Brian H. Hill
    • Jennifer J. Follstad Shah
    Letter
  • Here, the link between non-coding RNA and chromatin regulation is investigated through analysis of FLC — a regulator of flowering time in Arabidopsis and a target of several chromatin pathways. FLC is silenced by prolonged cold in a Polycomb-mediated process called vernalization. Upregulation of long non-coding antisense transcripts covering the entire FLC locus are now suggested to have an early role in the cold-induced silencing mechanism.

    • Szymon Swiezewski
    • Fuquan Liu
    • Caroline Dean
    Letter
  • Lymphomas often contain translocations that link c-myc to the immunoglobulin heavy chain locus (encoded by Igh), but the nature of the elements that activate oncogenes within such translocations is unknown. Transgenic mice with Igh 3' regulatory region (Igh3' RR) sequences fused to c-myc are predisposed to B lymphomas. Here, the oncogenic role of the Igh3' RR is investigated by inactivating it in two distinct mouse models for B-cell lymphoma with Igh–c-myc translocations.

    • Monica Gostissa
    • Catherine T. Yan
    • Frederick W. Alt
    Letter
  • Alanyl-tRNA synthetases (AlaRSs) may confuse glycine or serine with alanine, potentially causing mistranslation and thus profound functional consequences, with serine posing a bigger challenge than glycine. AlaXps — free-standing, genome-encoded editing proteins — represent one editing checkpoint to prevent this from occurring. Nine crystal structures, together with kinetic and mutational analysis, now show how AlaXps solve the serine misactivation problem.

    • Min Guo
    • Yeeting E. Chong
    • Paul Schimmel
    Letter
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Regions

  • The San Francisco Bay area has long been a hub for cutting-edge technologies. Now it is one of the nation's leaders in clean-energy research. Corinna Wu reports.

    • Corinna Wu
    Regions
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Futures

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Brief Communications Arising

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