Biogeochemistry: Microbes eat rock under ice
Martyn Tranter
See also
Letter by Christner et al.
Developmental biology: It takes muscle to make blood cells
Suphansa Sawamiphak &
Didier Y. R. Stainier
See also
Letter by Nguyen et al.
See also
Letter by Kobayashi et al.
Earth science: Warning signs of the Iquique earthquake
Roland Bürgmann
See also
Letter by Hayes et al.
See also
Letter by Schurr et al.
Palaeoanthropology: The time of the last Neanderthals
William Davies
See also
Letter by Higham et al.
Molecular physics: Complexity trapped by simplicity
Francesca Ferlaino
See also
Letter by Barry et al.
Population history: Human melting pots in southeast Asia
Jared Diamond
Ribosomal frameshifting in the CCR5 mRNA is regulated by miRNAs and the NMD pathway
Ashton Trey Belew,
Arturas Meskauskas,
Sharmishtha Musalgaonkar,
Vivek M. Advani,
Sergey O. Sulima
+ et al.
Programmed −1 ribosomal frameshifting (−1 PRF) is a process by which a signal in a messenger RNA causes a translating ribosome to shift by one nucleotide, thus changing the reading frame; here −1 PRF in the mRNA for the co-receptor for HIV-1, CCR5, is stimulated by two microRNAs and leads to degradation of the transcript by nonsense-mediated decay and at least one other decay pathway.
Crystal structure of a human GABAA receptor
Paul S. Miller &
A. Radu Aricescu
GABAA receptors are the principal mediators of rapid inhibitor synaptic transmission in the brain, and a decline in GABAA signalling leads to diseases including epilepsy, insomnia, anxiety and autism; here, the first X-ray crystal structure of a human GABAA receptor, the human β3 homopentamer, reveals structural features unique for this receptor class and uncovers the locations of key disease-causing mutations.
X-ray structure of the mouse serotonin 5-HT3 receptor
Ghérici Hassaine,
Cédric Deluz,
Luigino Grasso,
Romain Wyss,
Menno B. Tol
+ et al.
The first X-ray crystal structure of the mouse serotonin 5-HT3 receptor, a pentameric ligand-gated ion channel, is similar to those of other Cys-loop receptors — though here electron density for part of the cytoplasmic domain, which is important for trafficking, synaptic localization, and modulation by cytoplasmic proteins, but not visible in previous structures, is also described.
Letters
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Interacting supernovae from photoionization-confined shells around red supergiant stars
Jonathan Mackey,
Shazrene Mohamed,
Vasilii V. Gvaramadze,
Rubina Kotak,
Norbert Langer
+ et al.
A model in which the stellar wind of the fast-moving red supergiant Betelgeuse is photoionized by radiation from external sources can explain the dense, almost static shell recently discovered around the star, and predicts both that debris from Betelgeuse’s eventual supernova explosion will violently collide with the shell and that other red supergiants should have similar, but much more massive, shells.
Magneto-optical trapping of a diatomic molecule
J. F. Barry,
D. J. McCarron,
E. B. Norrgard,
M. H. Steinecker &
D. DeMille
Magneto-optical trapping is the standard method for laser cooling and confinement of atomic gases but now this technique has been demonstrated for the diatomic molecule strontium monofluoride, leading to the lowest temperature yet achieved by cooling a molecular gas.
See also
News & Views by Ferlaino
Abrupt glacial climate shifts controlled by ice sheet changes
Xu Zhang,
Gerrit Lohmann,
Gregor Knorr &
Conor Purcell
The volume of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheet controlled abrupt millennial-scale climate changes during the last glacial.
Continuing megathrust earthquake potential in Chile after the 2014 Iquique earthquake
Gavin P. Hayes,
Matthew W. Herman,
William D. Barnhart,
Kevin P. Furlong,
Sebástian Riquelme
+ et al.
The 2014 Iquique event was not the earthquake that had been expected to fill the regional seismic gap; given that significant sections of the northern Chile subduction zone have not ruptured in almost 150 years, it is likely that future megathrust earthquakes will occur south and potentially north of the 2014 Iquique sequence.
See also
News & Views by Bürgmann
See also
Letter by Schurr et al.
Gradual unlocking of plate boundary controlled initiation of the 2014 Iquique earthquake
Bernd Schurr,
Günter Asch,
Sebastian Hainzl,
Jonathan Bedford,
Andreas Hoechner
+ et al.
A long foreshock series unlocked the South American plate boundary until eventually initiating the M 8.1 Iquique, Chile, earthquake.
See also
News & Views by Bürgmann
See also
Letter by Hayes et al.
Dietary specializations and diversity in feeding ecology of the earliest stem mammals
Pamela G. Gill,
Mark A. Purnell,
Nick Crumpton,
Kate Robson Brown,
Neil J. Gostling
+ et al.
Differences in function and dietary ecology between Morganucodon and Kuehneotherium show that lineage splitting during the earliest stages of mammalian evolution was associated with ecomorphological specialization and niche partitioning.
The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance
Tom Higham,
Katerina Douka,
Rachel Wood,
Christopher Bronk Ramsey,
Fiona Brock
+ et al.
Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating is used to construct a chronology of Neanderthal disappearance, showing that Neanderthals overlapped with anatomically modern humans for between about 2,000 and 5,000 years.
See also
News & Views by Davies
A microbial ecosystem beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet
Brent C. Christner,
John C. Priscu,
Amanda M. Achberger,
Carlo Barbante,
Sasha P. Carter
+ et al.
There has been active debate over microbial life in Antarctic subglacial lakes owing to a paucity of direct observations from beneath the ice sheet and concerns about contamination in the samples that do exist; here the authors present the first geomicrobiological description of pristine water and surficial sediments from Subglacial Lake Whillans, and show that the lake water contains a diverse microbial community, many members of which are closely related to chemolithoautotrophic bacteria and archaea.
See also
News & Views by Tranter
Haematopoietic stem cell induction by somite-derived endothelial cells controlled by meox1
Phong Dang Nguyen,
Georgina Elizabeth Hollway,
Carmen Sonntag,
Lee Barry Miles,
Thomas Edward Hall
+ et al.
A new somite compartment, called the endotome, that contributes to the formation of the embryonic dorsal aorta by providing endothelial progenitors is identified here; endotome-derived endothelial progenitors, whose formation is regulated by the activity of the meox1 gene, induce haematopoietic stem cell formation upon colonization of the nascent dorsal aorta.
See also
News & Views by Sawamiphak & Stainier
See also
Letter by Kobayashi et al.
Jam1a–Jam2a interactions regulate haematopoietic stem cell fate through Notch signalling
Isao Kobayashi,
Jingjing Kobayashi-Sun,
Albert D. Kim,
Claire Pouget,
Naonobu Fujita
+ et al.
Notch signalling has a key role in the generation of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) during vertebrate development; here two adhesion molecules, Jam1a and Jam2a, are shown to be essential for the contact between precursors of HSCs and the somite during embryonic migration, and the Jam1a–Jam2a interaction is shown to be needed to transmit the Notch signal and produce HSCs.
See also
News & Views by Sawamiphak & Stainier
See also
Letter by Nguyen et al.
A vaccine targeting mutant IDH1 induces antitumour immunity
Theresa Schumacher,
Lukas Bunse,
Stefan Pusch,
Felix Sahm,
Benedikt Wiestler
+ et al.
The mutant IDH1 protein, which is expressed in a large fraction of human gliomas, is shown to be immunogenic; mutant-specific immune responses can be detected in patients with IDH1 mutated gliomas and generated in mice and are shown to treat established IDH1 mutant tumours in a syngeneic MHC humanized mouse model in a CD4 T-cell-dependent manner.
Dynamic pathways of −1 translational frameshifting
Jin Chen,
Alexey Petrov,
Magnus Johansson,
Albert Tsai,
Seán E. O’Leary
+ et al.
To investigate the mechanism of frameshifting during messenger RNA translation, a technique was developed to monitor translation of single molecules in real time using Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET); ribosomes were revealed to pause tenfold longer than usual during elongation at the frameshifting sites.
X-ray structures of GluCl in apo states reveal a gating mechanism of Cys-loop receptors
Thorsten Althoff,
Ryan E. Hibbs,
Surajit Banerjee &
Eric Gouaux
This study solved structures of the glutamate-gated chloride channel (GluCl), a Cys-loop receptor from C. elegans, in an apo, closed state and in a lipid-bound state — comparison of these structures with a previously published structure of GluCl in an ivermectin-bound state reveals what conformational changes probably occur as this membrane protein transitions from the closed/resting state towards an open/activated state.
Corrigendum
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Corrigendum: Palladium-catalysed C–H activation of aliphatic amines to give strained nitrogen heterocycles
Andrew McNally,
Benjamin Haffemayer,
Beatrice S. L. Collins &
Matthew J. Gaunt
Retraction
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Retraction: Generation of pluripotent stem cells from adult human testis
Sabine Conrad,
Markus Renninger,
Jörg Hennenlotter,
Tina Wiesner,
Lothar Just
+ et al.
