Policy: Bring sustainable energy to the developing world
Investment and policies must support cheap, clean energy technologies to cut both poverty and climate change, say Reid Detchon and Richenda Van Leeuwen.
Publishing: Credit where credit is due
Liz Allen, Amy Brand, Jo Scott, Micah Altman and Marjorie Hlava are trialling digital taxonomies to help researchers to identify their contributions to collaborative projects.
Astronomy: Art of the eclipse
As the next solar eclipse approaches, Jay M. Pasachoff and Roberta J. M. Olson ponder how artists from the early Renaissance onwards have interpreted the phenomenon.
Geology: Parsing eruptions
Ted Nield weighs up histories of two momentous volcanic events in Iceland and Indonesia.
Review of Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of Laki: The Volcano That Turned Eighteenth-Century Europe Dark Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World
Alexandra Witze, Jeff Kanipe & Gillen D'Arcy Wood
Animal behaviour: Nomads of necessity
Joel Greenberg casts an ornithologist's eye on a wide-ranging reading of animal migration.
Review of The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration
Bernd Heinrich
Obesity
Tony Scully
Society at large
Tony Scully
Cell physiology: The changing colour of fat
Brian Owens
Treatment: Marginal gains
Emily Anthes
Perspective: Obesity is not a disease
D. L. Katz
Heritability: The family roots of obesity
Cassandra Willyard
Microbiome: A complicated relationship status
Sarah Deweerdt
Neuroscience: Dissecting appetite
Bijal P. Trivedi
Perspective: Tricks of the trade
Stephen J. Simpson &
David Raubenheimer
Evolutionary biology: Dating chimpanzees
Michael Haslam
Genetics: Up and down in Down's syndrome
Benjamin D. Pope &
David M. Gilbert
See also
Article by Letourneau et al.
Organic chemistry: Catalysis marches on
James P. Morken
See also
Article by Mei et al.
Synthetic biology: Biocircuits in synchrony
Ricard Solé &
Javier Macía
See also
Letter by Prindle et al.
Thermoelectricity: The ugly duckling
Joseph P. Heremans
See also
Letter by Zhao et al.
Review
Top
The ensemble nature of allostery
Hesam N. Motlagh,
James O. Wrabl,
Jing Li &
Vincent J. Hilser
Allostery is the process by which biological macromolecules transmit the effect of binding at one site to another, often distal, functional site, allowing for the regulation of activity; here facilitation of allostery through dynamic and intrinsically disordered proteins is discussed, and a framework to unify the description of allosteric mechanisms for different systems is proposed.
Articles
Top
Enantioselective construction of remote quaternary stereocentres
Tian-Sheng Mei,
Harshkumar H. Patel &
Matthew S. Sigman
A catalytic and enantioselective intermolecular Heck-type reaction of trisubstituted-alkenyl alcohols with aryl boronic acids provides direct access to quaternary stereocentres remote from a carbonyl group.
See also
News & Views by Morken
Domains of genome-wide gene expression dysregulation in Down’s syndrome
Audrey Letourneau,
Federico A. Santoni,
Ximena Bonilla,
M. Reza Sailani,
David Gonzalez
+ et al.
By studying the transcriptome of fetal cells of monozygotic twins discordant for trisomy 21, this paper finds that differential expression between the twins is organized in domains along all chromosomes; these gene expression dysregulation domains are conserved in the mouse model of Down’s syndrome and correlate with the lamina-associated domains and replication domains.
See also
News & Views by Pope & Gilbert
Brainstem nucleus MdV mediates skilled forelimb motor tasks
Maria Soledad Esposito,
Paolo Capelli &
Silvia Arber
The authors use a combination of viral tracing and genetics to characterize the diversity of neurons projecting from mouse brainstem to motor neurons that control limb movements; in particular they discover that the medullary reticular formation ventral part (MdV) is functionally specialized for skilled forelimb motor control.
Skilled reaching relies on a V2a propriospinal internal copy circuit
Eiman Azim,
Juan Jiang,
Bror Alstermark &
Thomas M. Jessell
Cervical propriospinal neurons (PNs) form a genetically accessible subclass of V2a interneurons that convey both premotor output and precerebellar copy signals; their ablation in mice impairs reaching movements selectively, and activation of their internal copy projection recruits a rapid cerebellar feedback loop that modulates forelimb movement.
Letters
Top
Isotopic links between atmospheric chemistry and the deep sulphur cycle on Mars
Heather B. Franz,
Sang-Tae Kim,
James Farquhar,
James M. D. Day,
Rita C. Economos
+ et al.
Isotopic analyses of 40 Martian meteorites indicate that assimilation of sulphur into Martian magmas was a common occurrence throughout much of the planet’s history and that the atmospheric imprint of photochemical processing preserved in Martian meteoritic sulphide and sulphate is distinct from that observed in terrestrial analogues.
Coherent suppression of electromagnetic dissipation due to superconducting quasiparticles
Ioan M. Pop,
Kurtis Geerlings,
Gianluigi Catelani,
Robert J. Schoelkopf,
Leonid I. Glazman
+ et al.
The long-predicted suppression of quasiparticle dissipation in a Josephson junction when the phase difference across the junction is π is inferred from a sharp maximum in the energy relaxation time of a superconducting artificial atom.
Ultralow thermal conductivity and high thermoelectric figure of merit in SnSe crystals
Li-Dong Zhao,
Shih-Han Lo,
Yongsheng Zhang,
Hui Sun,
Gangjian Tan
+ et al.
The main obstacle to improving the thermoelectric efficiency of a material arises from the common interdependence of electrical and thermal conductivity, whereas one ideally wants to raise the former while lowering the latter: a simple layered crystalline material — SnSe — is now reported that seems to have these qualities built in.
See also
News & Views by Heremans
Mid-latitude interhemispheric hydrologic seesaw over the past 550,000 years
Kyoung-nam Jo,
Kyung Sik Woo,
Sangheon Yi,
Dong Yoon Yang,
Hyoun Soo Lim
+ et al.
Tropical and subtropical speleothems show that the latitudinal migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone tends to produce increased precipitation in one hemisphere and drying in the other; now it is shown using speleothems from the Korean peninsula that this phenomenon extended to the mid-latitudes during the past 550,000 years.
A new fossil species supports an early origin for toothed whale echolocation
Jonathan H. Geisler,
Matthew W. Colbert &
James L. Carew
Phylogenetic analysis of a new species of fossil toothed whale, Cotylocara macei, from the Oligocene epoch places it in a basal clade of odontocetes, and its features suggest that rudimentary echolocation evolved in the early Oligocene and was followed by convergent evolution in their skulls.
Rapid and tunable post-translational coupling of genetic circuits
Arthur Prindle,
Jangir Selimkhanov,
Howard Li,
Ivan Razinkov,
Lev S. Tsimring
+ et al.
Protease competition is used to produce rapid and tunable coupling of genetic circuits, enabling a coupled clock network that can encode independent environmental cues into a single time series output, a form of frequency multiplexing in a genetic circuit context.
See also
News & Views by Solé & Macía
Apical constriction drives tissue-scale hydrodynamic flow to mediate cell elongation
Bing He,
Konstantin Doubrovinski,
Oleg Polyakov &
Eric Wieschaus
The lengthening phase of ventral furrow formation in Drosophila gastrulation is driven by cytoplasmic flows triggered by apical constriction of mesoderm cells independent of the mechanical inputs from the basolateral membranes.
A committed precursor to innate lymphoid cells
Michael G. Constantinides,
Benjamin D. McDonald,
Philip A. Verhoef &
Albert Bendelac
A committed precursor to innate lymphoid cell lineages, but not classical natural killer and lymphoid tissue inducer cells, is derived from common lymphoid precursors and distinguished by high levels of expression of the transcription factor PLZF.
Protection against filovirus diseases by a novel broad-spectrum nucleoside analogue BCX4430
Travis K. Warren,
Jay Wells,
Rekha G. Panchal,
Kelly S. Stuthman,
Nicole L. Garza
+ et al.
A broad-spectrum antiviral small molecule is reported to act as an inhibitor of viral polymerase activity and is shown to be effective in protecting non-human primates from lethal filovirus infection when administered after exposure.
Caenorhabditis elegans pathways that surveil and defend mitochondria
Ying Liu,
Buck S. Samuel,
Peter C. Breen &
Gary Ruvkun
A genome-wide RNA interference screen in Caenorhabditis elegans identifies 45 genes with roles in protective pathways following drug- and genetic-disruption-induced mitochondrial inhibition.
See also
News & Views by Wolff & Dillin
miRNAs trigger widespread epigenetically activated siRNAs from transposons in Arabidopsis
Kate M. Creasey,
Jixian Zhai,
Filipe Borges,
Frederic Van Ex,
Michael Regulski
+ et al.
The generation of widespread epigenetically activated short interfering RNAs by the targeting of microRNAs to transposon transcripts in Arabidopsis thaliana is shown to be a latent mechanism that only becomes active when the transcripts are epigenetically reactivated, for example, during reprogramming of the germ line.
Structural basis for translocation by AddAB helicase–nuclease and its arrest at χ sites
Wojciech W. Krajewski,
Xin Fu,
Martin Wilkinson,
Nora B. Cronin,
Mark S. Dillingham
+ et al.
A dual-function helicase–nuclease, typified by RecBCD in Escherichia coli, acts on free DNA ends during bacterial double-stranded break repair until it reaches a χ sequence at which it pauses before continuing with modified enzymatic properties; here several crystal structures of the related AddAB enzyme from Bacillus subtilis bound to χ-containing DNA are presented, offering insight into χ recognition and its effect on DNA translocation.
nature, THE INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE
gepflegtes Exemplar, nur kleine Lesespuren
- Verlag:
- NPG Nature publishing group
- Englische Ausgabe
- Artikelnummer:
- B00042580
- Gewicht:
- 400 gr