Polar research: Six priorities for Antarctic science
Mahlon C. Kennicutt II, Steven L. Chown and colleagues outline the most pressing questions in southern polar research, and call for greater collaboration and environmental protection in the region.
Books and Arts
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Culture: Artistic alchemy
Philip Ball unveils the scientific iconography in Albrecht Dürer's enigmatic engraving Melencolia I.
Bias towards large genes in autism
Shahar Shohat &
Sagiv Shifman
Zylka et al. reply
Mark J. Zylka,
Ben D. Philpot &
Ian F. King
Materials chemistry: Seeds of selective nanotube growth
James M. Tour
See also
Letter by Sanchez-Valencia et al.
Cancer: Directions for the drivers
Greg Gibson
See also
Letter by Ongen et al.
Neurodegeneration: Alzheimer's disease under strain
Adriano Aguzzi
Astrophysics: Portrait of a doomed star
Stephen Justham
See also
Letter by McCully et al.
HIV: Early treatment may not be early enough
Kai Deng &
Robert F. Siliciano
See also
Letter by Whitney et al.
Evolution: Tooth structure re-engineered
Zhe-Xi Luo
See also
Article by Harjunmaa et al.
Articles
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Convergence of terrestrial plant production across global climate gradients
Sean T. Michaletz,
Dongliang Cheng,
Andrew J. Kerkhoff &
Brian J. Enquist
Net primary production is affected by temperature and precipitation, but whether this is a direct kinetic effect on plant metabolism or an indirect ecological effect mediated by changes in plant age, plant biomass or growing season length is unclear — this study develops metabolic scaling theory to be able to answer this question and applies it to a global data set of plant productivity, concluding that it is indirect effects that explain the influence of climate on productivity, which is characterized by a common scaling relationship across climate gradients.
Replaying evolutionary transitions from the dental fossil record
Enni Harjunmaa,
Kerstin Seidel,
Teemu Häkkinen,
Elodie Renvoisé,
Ian J. Corfe
+ et al.
Gradual changes that occur to mammalian tooth morphology across evolutionary time were modelled in vitro and in vivo by modulation of signalling pathways in the mouse, and computer modelling was used to provide further analysis of the parameters influencing tooth morphology.
See also
News & Views by Luo
Structure of the DDB1–CRBN E3 ubiquitin ligase in complex with thalidomide
Eric S. Fischer,
Kerstin Böhm,
John R. Lydeard,
Haidi Yang,
Michael B. Stadler
+ et al.
The crystal structures of thalidomide and its derivatives bound to the E3 ligase subcomplex DDB1–CRBN are shown; these drugs are found to have dual functions, interfering with the binding of certain cellular substrates to the E3 ligase but promoting the binding of others, thereby modulating the degradation of cellular proteins.
Letters
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A luminous, blue progenitor system for the type Iax supernova 2012Z
Curtis McCully,
Saurabh W. Jha,
Ryan J. Foley,
Lars Bildsten,
Wen-fai Fong
+ et al.
The detection of the luminous, blue progenitor system of the type Iax supernova 2012Z suggests that this supernova was the explosion of a white dwarf accreting material from a helium-star companion.
See also
News & Views by Justham
Tunable spin–spin interactions and entanglement of ions in separate potential wells
A. C. Wilson,
Y. Colombe,
K. R. Brown,
E. Knill,
D. Leibfried
+ et al.
The ability of individual ions trapped in separate potential wells to simulate spin–spin interactions is demonstrated by tuning the Coulomb interaction between two ions, independently controlling their local wells and entangling their internal states with a fidelity of approximately 0.82.
Controlled synthesis of single-chirality carbon nanotubes
Juan Ramon Sanchez-Valencia,
Thomas Dienel,
Oliver Gröning,
Ivan Shorubalko,
Andreas Mueller
+ et al.
Present preparation methods fail to meet fully the demand for structurally pure single-walled carbon nanotubes; surface-catalysed cyclodehydrogenation reactions are now shown to convert precursor molecules deposited on a platinum(111) surface into ultrashort nanotube seeds that can then be grown further into defect-free and structurally pure single-walled carbon nanotubes of single chirality.
See also
News & Views by Tour
A global ocean inventory of anthropogenic mercury based on water column measurements
Carl H. Lamborg,
Chad R. Hammerschmidt,
Katlin L. Bowman,
Gretchen J. Swarr,
Kathleen M. Munson
+ et al.
GEOTRACES sampling of deep water from the Atlantic, Pacific and Southern oceans allows an estimate of the amount (tripled in surface waters) and distribution (two-thirds increase in water less than a thousand metres deep) of anthropogenic mercury accumulating in the global ocean.
Negative regulation of the NLRP3 inflammasome by A20 protects against arthritis
Lieselotte Vande Walle,
Nina Van Opdenbosch,
Peggy Jacques,
Amelie Fossoul,
Eveline Verheugen
+ et al.
Pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis depends critically on the NLRP3 inflammasome/interleukin-1 signalling axis.
Rapid seeding of the viral reservoir prior to SIV viraemia in rhesus monkeys
James B. Whitney,
Alison L. Hill,
Srisowmya Sanisetty,
Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster,
Jinyan Liu
+ et al.
Reservoirs of virus infection represent the most important reason why HIV-1 cannot be cured with current antiretroviral drugs; now the refractory viral reservoir is shown to be seeded as early as 3 days after infection in a monkey model, even before the virus is detected in the blood.
See also
News & Views by Deng & Siliciano
Neuropathy of haematopoietic stem cell niche is essential for myeloproliferative neoplasms
Lorena Arranz,
Abel Sánchez-Aguilera,
Daniel Martín-Pérez,
Joan Isern,
Xavier Langa
+ et al.
Myeloproliferative neoplasms are caused by mutations in the haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) compartment, and here the authors show that the HSC niche contributes to the pathogenesis; sympathetic innervation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) is reduced in the bone marrow of patients, which leads to reduced MSC numbers and increased mutant HSC expansion, and restoring sympathetic regulation of MSCs with neuroprotective/sympathomimetic drugs prevents mutant HSC expansion.
PVT1 dependence in cancer with MYC copy-number increase
Yuen-Yi Tseng,
Branden S. Moriarity,
Wuming Gong,
Ryutaro Akiyama,
Ashutosh Tiwari
+ et al.
Pvt1 overexpression in mice contributes to high Myc levels due to 8q24.21 gain and to MYC-driven tumorigenesis.
Putative cis-regulatory drivers in colorectal cancer
Halit Ongen,
Claus L. Andersen,
Jesper B. Bramsen,
Bodil Oster,
Mads H. Rasmussen
+ et al.
Examination of allele-specific expression identifies 71 genes with excess somatic cis-regulatory effects in colorectal cancer (CRC), and 1,693 and 948 expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) in normal samples and tumours, respectively (with 36% of tumour eQTLs exclusive to CRC); tumour-specific eQTLs are more enriched for low CRC genome-wide association study P values and accumulate more somatic mutations than shared eQTLs, suggesting a role as germline-derived cancer regulatory drivers.
See also
News & Views by Gibson
Genome-scale functional characterization of Drosophila developmental enhancers in vivo
Evgeny Z. Kvon,
Tomas Kazmar,
Gerald Stampfel,
J. Omar Yáñez-Cuna,
Michaela Pagani
+ et al.
Systematically assaying the activity of 7,705 candidate enhancers during Drosophila embryogenesis shows that nearly half are active in the embryo and display dynamic spatial patterns during development; enhancer activity is matched to expression patterns of putative target genes and predictive cis-regulatory motifs are identified.
Enhancer loops appear stable during development and are associated with paused polymerase
Yad Ghavi-Helm,
Felix A. Klein,
Tibor Pakozdi,
Lucia Ciglar,
Daan Noordermeer
+ et al.
A high-resolution map of enhancer three-dimensional contacts during Drosophila embryogenesis shows that although local regulatory interactions are frequent, long-range interactions are also very common; unexpectedly, most interactions appear unchanged between tissues and across development and are formed prior to gene expression, indicating that transcription initiates from preformed enhancer–promoter loops, which are associated with paused polymerase.
Visualizing the kinetic power stroke that drives proton-coupled zinc(ii) transport
Sayan Gupta,
Jin Chai,
Jie Cheng,
Rhijuta D’Mello,
Mark R. Chance
+ et al.
In the transport cycle of Yiip, zinc(ii) binding triggers a highly localized, all-or-nothing change of water accessibility to the transport site and an adjacent hydrophobic gate.