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Researchers in San Francisco have findings that suggest a whole new side to RNA interference. Erika Check reports on their attempts to make a revolutionary field more revolutionary still.
Roughly 2% of humans suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, but a lack of animal models has impeded research into this condition. Could a genetically engineered mouse model provide an exciting lead?
When measuring photons, it's a case of 'wanted, dead' — catching them alive is not an option. But we can observe how a superposition of many photon waves progressively collapses as it interacts with a beam of atoms.
Ageing populations raise the spectre of crippling healthcare costs. Extra spending on medical research might bring healthier, happier older people who work (and pay taxes) for longer. Is that a good investment?
Take silicon, soak in water, add acid — and stir. This simple new recipe for the self-assembly of complex microstructures belies an involved sequence of hydrophobic, electrostatic and van der Waals interactions.
Statistical analyses of the networks formed by plant–animal mutualisms can now take account of the relatedness of the players on either side. How helpful is this innovation for understanding network dynamics?
Synthetic microcapsules with membrane-bound inner chambers in which chemical reactions can be isolated and controlled have been assembled, layer by layer. Could artificial cells be on the horizon?
Was the early Earth a blackened landscape of congealed lava, or was it cool enough for oceans to form? The discovery of diamonds in the oldest-known relics of surface rocks adds new élan to this debate.
The strength of network biology lies in its ability to derive cell biological information without a priori mechanistic or molecular knowledge. It is demonstrated that a molecular understanding of clathrin-mediated endocytosis can refine the network approach and allows the derivation of general biological principles.
This paper reports the observation of a step-by-step state collapse by using atoms to non-destructively measure the photon number of a field stored in a cavity. The procedure illustrates all the postulates of quantum measurement and should facilitate studies of non-classical fields trapped in cavities.
Targeted deletion of SAPAP3, a postsynaptic scaffolding protein expressed in the striatum, yields a behavioral phenotype with many characteristics of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). SAPAP3−/− mice compulsively overgroom themselves and are unusually anxious. Behavioral symptoms are alleviated by SSRIs, and both behaviour and physiological abnormalities are rescued by lentiviral-mediated expression of SAPAP3 in the striatum.
This paper describes the first evidence of a role for gap junctions in neuronal migration, and also shows that the adhesive properties of the gap junctions, not the conductivity of their channels, are important for the migration.
The hypothesis that large ice sheets were present in both hemispheres ∼41.6 million years ago is tested, using marine sediment records from the equatorial Atlantic Ocean. The estimates of ice volume at this time can easily be accommodated on Antarctica, but were not the Northern Hemisphere. These findings support climate model simulations, which indicate that the threshold for continental glaciation was crossed earlier in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere, due to the different land–ocean distributions at the two poles.
A new chronology for Antarctic ice cores has been constructed based on the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen molecules in air trapped in the ice. This seems to reflect changes in local summer insolation, and thus allows the relative timing of changes in insolation and Antarctic climate to be determined. The results show that orbital-scale Antarctic climate change lagged Northern Hemisphere insolation over the past 360,000 years, and that increases in Antarctic temperature at the last four glacial-interglacial transitions took place within phases of increasing Northern Hemisphere insolation.
This paper reports the discovery of micro-diamond inclusions in zircon from the Jack Hills (Western Australia), which is up to 4,252 million years old and includes the oldest known diamonds found in terrestrial rocks. The spread of ages indicates that either the conditions required for diamond formation were repeated several times during early Earth history or that there was significant recycling of ancient diamond.
Fossil teeth from Ethiopia are presented that look very similar to those of a modern gorilla, despite being 10 million years old. If the teeth, assigned to a new species of fossil ape, come from a creature on the gorilla lineage, then the divergence between gorillas and the chimp–human stock must have happened before that time, constraining divergence dates reached through the comparison of contemporary genetic sequences.
A phylogenetic approach is used to show that past evolutionary history partly explains network patterns that link plants and their pollinators and seed dispersers. Species close in the phylogeny tend to play similar roles in the network. As a result, co-extinction cascades following the extinction of a species affect taxonomically related species, resulting in a non-random pruning of the evolutionary tree.
Immunoglobulin-A (IgA) is the main immunoglobulin found in mucous sectretions. B cell class-switch recombination to IgA in mucosa-associated tissues is regulated by a subset of dendritic cells which produce TNF-α and inducible nitric oxide in response to the recognition of commensal bacteria by toll-like receptors
The human thymus is given the difficult task of teaching T-cells which antigens are 'foreign' and which are 'self', a process which seems to go wrong in autoimmune disorders. A study of variation in the promoter of one gene expressed in thymus shows that one nucleotide change can disrupt gene regulation, and might lead to increased risk for autoimmune disease.
In Arabidopsis thaliana, the evolutionary conserved protein kinases KIN10 and KIN11, control reprogramming of transcription factors in response to seemingly unrelated conditions such as darkness, sugar and stress conditions. Hence KIN10 and KIN11 are key players in linking a variety of stress conditions in plants and globally regulate plant metabolism and survival.
A locus on chromosome 9p21 which encodes three cell cycle inhibitors is frequently deleted in human cancer. Two of these, p16INKa and p14ARF, function as tumour suppressors. A new mouse model now shows that a third, p15INK4b, also contributes to the tumour suppressor function of this locus. Mice lacking all three show enhanced tumourigenesis and a broader tumour spectrum.
Reports on single cell experiments in budding yeast that analyse the role of molecular noise during the G1 phase of the cell cycle. Variability in the timing of G1 can be attributed to variations in cell size at cell birth, as well as variations of a size-independent 'timer' step. These two steps are modular and together control the timing of the critical Start transition of the G1 phase.
The mechanism underlying inhibition of sodium-coupled neurotransmitter transporters by tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) is investigated, and it is found that TCAs bind noncompetitively to an extracellular facing vestibule to inhibit the release of substrate.
Millions of tissue samples have been collected and archived, but researchers wanting to explore them at the molecular level have found it tough going. Nathan Blow investigates the issues.