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Stem cells: Taking a stand against pseudoscience
Elena Cattaneo and Gilberto Corbellini are among the academics working to protect patients from questionable stem-cell therapies. Here, they share their experiences and opinions of the long, hard fight for evidence to prevail.
Regulation: Sell help not hope
Stem cells are being used as a wedge in calls to allow unproven medical interventions onto the market, warn Paolo Bianco and Douglas Sipp.
Books and Arts
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Evolution: The complexity chronicles
Nancy Moran enjoys a treatise on symbiosis — the intimate association of species that transformed life and Earth.
Review of One Plus One Equals One: Symbiosis and the Evolution of Complex Life
John Archibald
Articles
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Contextuality supplies the ‘magic’ for quantum computation
Mark Howard,
Joel Wallman,
Victor Veitch &
Joseph Emerson
Quantum computing promises advantages over classical computing for certain problems; now ‘quantum contextuality’ — a generalization of the concept of quantum non-locality — is shown to be a critical resource that gives the most promising class of quantum computers their power.
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News & Views by Bartlett
The genome of Eucalyptus grandisOpen
Alexander A. Myburg,
Dario Grattapaglia,
Gerald A. Tuskan,
Uffe Hellsten,
Richard D. Hayes
+ et al.
The Eucalyptus grandis genome has been sequenced, revealing the greatest number of tandem duplications of any plant genome sequenced so far, and the highest diversity of genes for specialized metabolites that act as chemical defence and provide unique pharmaceutical oils; genome sequencing of the sister species E. globulus and a set of inbred E. grandis tree genomes reveals dynamic genome evolution and hotspots of inbreeding depression.
Single-cell RNA-seq reveals dynamic paracrine control of cellular variation
Alex K. Shalek,
Rahul Satija,
Joe Shuga,
John J. Trombetta,
Dave Gennert
+ et al.
Large-scale single-cell RNA-seq of stimulated primary mouse bone-marrow-derived dendritic cells highlights positive and negative intercellular signalling pathways that promote and restrain cellular variation.
The mitochondrial deubiquitinase USP30 opposes parkin-mediated mitophagy
Baris Bingol,
Joy S. Tea,
Lilian Phu,
Mike Reichelt,
Corey E. Bakalarski
+ et al.
Damaged mitochondria are removed by mitophagy, and defects in mitophagy are linked to Parkinson’s disease; here it is shown that USP30, a deubiquitinase localized to mitochondria, antagonizes mitophagy by removing the ubiquitin tags put in place by Parkin, USP30 inhibition is therefore potentially beneficial for Parkinson’s disease by promoting mitochondrial clearance and quality control.
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News & Views by Ordureau & Harper
Letters
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Measurement of the magnetic interaction between two bound electrons of two separate ions
Shlomi Kotler,
Nitzan Akerman,
Nir Navon,
Yinnon Glickman &
Roee Ozeri
The magnetic interaction between two electrons is measured at the micrometre scale, exhibiting spin entanglement generation over 15 seconds of coherent evolution; varying the inter-electron separation shows a distance dependence consistent with the inverse-cube law.
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News & Views by Schmidt-Kaler
Ultrafast X-ray probing of water structure below the homogeneous ice nucleation temperature
J. A. Sellberg,
C. Huang,
T. A. McQueen,
N. D. Loh,
H. Laksmono
+ et al.
Femtosecond X-ray laser pulses are used to probe the structure of liquid water in micrometre-sized droplets that have been cooled below the homogeneous ice nucleation temperature, revealing the existence of metastable bulk liquid water down to temperatures of 227 kelvin.
Metastable liquid–liquid transition in a molecular model of water
Jeremy C. Palmer,
Fausto Martelli,
Yang Liu,
Roberto Car,
Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos
+ et al.
A stable crystal phase and two metastable liquid phases of the ST2 model of water exist at the same deeply supercooled condition, and the two liquids undergo a first-order liquid–liquid transition that meets stringent thermodynamic criteria.
Possible control of subduction zone slow-earthquake periodicity by silica enrichment
Pascal Audet &
Roland Bürgmann
Seismic data from subduction zones that exhibit slow earthquakes reveal that the ratio of compressional-wave to shear-wave velocity of the overriding forearc crust is linearly related to the average recurrence time of slow earthquakes and that this may be associated with quartz enrichment within the forearc crust.
mTORC1 controls the adaptive transition of quiescent stem cells from G0 to GAlert
Joseph T. Rodgers,
Katherine Y. King,
Jamie O. Brett,
Melinda J. Cromie,
Gregory W. Charville
+ et al.
A mouse study reveals that the stem cell quiescent state is composed of two distinct phases, G0 and GAlert; stem cells reversibly transition between these two phases in response to systemic environmental stimuli acting through the mTORC1 pathway.
The metabolite α-ketoglutarate extends lifespan by inhibiting ATP synthase and TOR
Randall M. Chin,
Xudong Fu,
Melody Y. Pai,
Laurent Vergnes,
Heejun Hwang
+ et al.
Ageing in the worm Caenorhabditis elegans is shown to be delayed by supplementation with α-ketoglutarate, an effect that is probably mediated by ATP synthase—which is identified as a direct target of α-ketoglutarate—and target of rapamycin (TOR).
PTEN action in leukaemia dictated by the tissue microenvironment
Cornelius Miething,
Claudio Scuoppo,
Benedikt Bosbach,
Iris Appelmann,
Joy Nakitandwe
+ et al.
A mouse model of T-cell leukaemia is used to test whether PTEN loss is required for tumour maintenance as well as initiation; although it had little effect on tumour load in haematopoietic organs, PTEN reactivation reduced the CCR9-dependent tumour dissemination to the intestine that was amplified on PTEN loss, exposing the importance of tumour microenvironment in PTEN-deficient settings.
Inactivation of PI(3)K p110δ breaks regulatory T-cell-mediated immune tolerance to cancer
Khaled Ali,
Dalya R. Soond,
Roberto Piñeiro,
Thorsten Hagemann,
Wayne Pearce
+ et al.
The kinase PI(3)Kδ is shown to be required for the immunosuppressive function of regulatory T cells; inactivation of PI(3)Kδ in these cells leads to enhanced cytotoxic T-cell function and restricts tumour growth and metastasis in a variety of mouse tumour models.
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News & Views by Hirsch & Novelli
CFIm25 links alternative polyadenylation to glioblastoma tumour suppression
Chioniso P. Masamha,
Zheng Xia,
Jingxuan Yang,
Todd R. Albrecht,
Min Li
+ et al.
CFIm25 is identified as a factor that prevents messenger RNAs being shortened due to altered 3′ polyadenylation, which typically occurs when cells undergo high proliferation and correlates with increased tumorigenic activity in glioblastoma tumours.
Persistent gut microbiota immaturity in malnourished Bangladeshi children
Sathish Subramanian,
Sayeeda Huq,
Tanya Yatsunenko,
Rashidul Haque,
Mustafa Mahfuz
+ et al.
Bacterial species whose representation defines healthy postnatal assembly of the gut microbiota in Bangladeshi children during their first 2 years are identified, and a model is constructed to compare healthy children to those with severe acute malnutrition (SAM); results show that SAM is associated with microbiota immaturity that is only partially ameliorated by existing nutritional interventions.
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News & Views by Costello & Relman
Ribosomal oxygenases are structurally conserved from prokaryotes to humans
Rasheduzzaman Chowdhury,
Rok Sekirnik,
Nigel C. Brissett,
Tobias Krojer,
Chia-hua Ho
+ et al.
Crystal structures of human and prokaryotic ribosomal oxygenases reported here, with and without their ribosomal protein substrates, support their assignments as hydroxylases, and provide insights into the evolution of the JmjC-domain-containing hydroxylases and demethylases.
Co-opting sulphur-carrier proteins from primary metabolic pathways for 2-thiosugar biosynthesis
Eita Sasaki,
Xuan Zhang,
He G. Sun,
Mei-Yeh Jade Lu,
Tsung-lin Liu
+ et al.
How sulphur is incorporated into sulphur-containing secondary metabolites is poorly understood; here, the bacterium Amycolatopsis orientalis is shown to co-opt sulphur-carrier proteins from primary metabolic pathways to facilitate the biosynthesis of sulphur-containing natural products.
Corrigenda
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Corrigendum: Sea-level and deep-sea-temperature variability over the past 5.3 million years
E. J. Rohling,
G. L. Foster,
K. M. Grant,
G. Marino,
A. P. Roberts
+ et al.
Corrigendum: Fuel gain exceeding unity in an inertially confined fusion implosion
O. A. Hurricane,
D. A. Callahan,
D. T. Casey,
P. M. Celliers,
C. Cerjan
+ et al.
