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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.452 NO.7183 DATED 06 March 2008
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Neuroscience: Building a picture of sight
Biomaterials: Know your hydrogel onions
Genomes: The role of the mushroom in plant productivity
Information processing: Quantum interface
And finally… Where have all the midges gone?
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Neuroscience: Building a picture of sight (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature06713
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 05 March at 1800 London time / 1300 US Eastern time (which is also when the embargo lifts) as part of our AOP (ahead of print) programme. Although we have included it on this release to avoid multiple mailings it will not appear in print on 06 March, but at a later date. ***
A device that can ‘read’ the brain and produce a picture of a person’s visual experience could soon become a reality. Online in Nature this week researchers describe a model that defines the relationship between visual stimuli and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity in early visual areas, making it possible to identify specific images seen by an observer.
Jack L. Gallant and colleagues developed receptive-field models that combine measures of orientation, frequency and dimensions of space in the brain in order to predict the novel complex natural objects being viewed by subjects. Previous studies attempting to interpret visual experiences through fMRI have only been able to decode much simpler information and required that the models be trained on the exact same set of objects that they would later be tested on.
This model-based approach to decoding brain signals could, in future, be used to track mental processes such as attention, and perhaps even provide access to the visual content of phenomena such as dreams and imagery.
CONTACT
Jack L. Gallant (University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 510 642 2606; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Biomaterials: Know your hydrogel onions (pp 76-79)
Hydrogels — hydrated networks of polymers — have a variety of applications and are particularly appealing in the field of biomedical engineering, for example as drug delivery vehicles inside the body and as scaffolds for ‘engineering’ artificial body tissues. A paper in this week’s Nature describes a new methodology for creating multilayered concentric hydrogel structures — at a scale that is just right for tissue and organ engineering.
Laurent David and colleagues use the naturally occurring polymer chitosan to create the structures. Chitosan is biocompatible and resorbable. The multistep preparation technique allows any number of hydrogel layers to be introduced, creating onion-like structures and multilayered tubes — ideal for harbouring drugs for internal delivery or for spreading with different cells to start building up tissues artificially.
CONTACT
Laurent David (University of Lyon, Villeurbanne, France)
Tel: +33 4 72 43 16 05; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Genomes: The role of the mushroom in plant productivity (pp 88-92; N&V)
The genome of a fungus that lives on the roots of trees offers an unparalleled opportunity for understanding how symbionts interact with plants within their own ecosystem. The Laccaria bicolor sequence, published in Nature this week, is a step towards comprehending how such interactions perform vital functions in carbon and nitrogen cycles that are fundamental to sustainable plant productivity.
L. bicolor, a familiar-looking mushroom, lives on the roots of trees in a symbiotic relationship. Francis Martin and colleagues describe the genome of this fungus and explain what it reveals about plant–fungus interactions shaping genomes over time. Analysis of the genes reveals that this fungus has an ability to take advantage of nutrient-rich areas within a low-nutrient environment. Such fungi have an important role in mobilizing nitrogen from well-decomposed organic matter, and the genome codes for many enzymes that are secreted to break up proteins in the surrounding material.
CONTACT
Francis Martin (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Nancy, France)
Tel: +33 383 39 40 80; E-mail: [email protected]
Dan Cullan (United States Department of Agriculture, Madison, WI, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 608 231 9468; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Information processing: Quantum interface (pp 67-71; N&V)
Quantum computation can achieve tasks that would be impossible with classical information processing. Networks need to be able to create, store and distribute a resource known as entanglement. A critical element in scalable quantum networks is realized in a paper in this week’s Nature — a quantum interface for the on-demand generation and reversible mapping of an entangled state into a quantum memory.
H. J. Kimble and colleagues demonstrate that photonic entanglement — generated by splitting a single photon — can be reversibly transferred into and out of an atomic quantum memory, effectively separating the processes for the generation of entanglement and its storage. They claim that with improvements in single-photon sources their protocol will provide an efficient ‘push-button’ route towards the generation, storage and distribution of entanglement.
CONTACT
H. J. Kimble (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 626 395 8340; E-mail: [email protected]
Lene V Hau (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 617 496 5967; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] And finally… Where have all the midges gone? (pp 84-87)
Lake Myvatn in Iceland deserves its name — translated as ‘midge lake’ — as it is thick with midges, although the insect’s population density fluctuates wildly by up to six orders of magnitude every 4–7 years or so. A paper in this week’s Nature seeks to explain the complex dynamics behind these variations, and finds that they are sensitive to, among other factors, human disturbances to the lake.
Anthony Ives and colleagues collected data on variations in the abundance of the midge Tanytarsus gracilentus at the lake since 1977. In periods when the midges are most dense, larvae don’t develop properly because there aren’t enough algae to feed them, and so the population crashes. Numbers recover as food ‘subsidies’ — for example, from the bottom of the lake — gradually enter the midges’ habitat. But human activity such as dredging can interfere with this reserve food supply, and may have caused midge fluctuations to increase over the past few decades.
From a conservation perspective, say the authors, this represents a challenge for managing the ecosystem: not only are midge dynamics inherently unpredictable, they are also extremely and unexpectedly vulnerable to disturbance.
CONTACT
Anthony Ives (University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA)
Tel: +1 608 262 1519; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[6] Cyclical DNA methylation of a transcriptionally active promoter (pp 45-50)
[7] The MC-Fold and MC-Sym pipeline infers RNA structure from sequence data (pp 51-55)
[8] Structure and metal exchange in the cadmium carbonic anhydrase of marine diatoms (pp 56-61)
[9] The unexpected origin of plasmaspheric hiss from discrete chorus emissions (pp 62-66; N&V)
[10] Strong dispersive coupling of a high-finesse cavity to a micromechanical membrane (pp 72-75)
[11] Near-isothermal conditions in the middle and lower crust induced by melt migration (pp 80-83)
[12] Transient cyclical methylation of promoter DNA (pp 112-115)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 05 March at 1800 London time / 1300 US Eastern time (which is also when the embargo lifts) as part of our AOP (ahead of print) programme. Although we have included them on this release to avoid multiple mailings they will not appear in print on 06 March, but at a later date. ***
[13] Broad phylogenomic sampling improves resolution of the animal tree of life
DOI: 10.1038/nature06614
[14] X-ray structure of a prokaryotic pentameric ligand-gated ion channel
DOI: 10.1038/nature06717
[15] Isolation of an active step I spliceosome and composition of its RNP core
DOI: 10.1038/nature06842
[16] Memory CD4 T cells emerge from effector T-cell progenitors
DOI: 10.1038/nature06672
GEOGRAPHICAL LISTING OF AUTHORS…
The following list of places refers to the whereabouts of authors on the papers numbered in this release. For example, London: 4 - this means that on paper number four, there will be at least one author affiliated to an institute or company in London. The listing may be for an author's main affiliation, or for a place where they are working temporarily. Please see the PDF of the paper for full details.
BELGIUM
Ghent: 3
CANADA:
Montreal: 7
DENMARK
Copenhagen: 13
FRANCE
Champenoux: 3
Evry: 3
Marseille: 3
Paris: 4
Rennes: 6, 12
Villeurbanne: 2, 3
GERMANY
Goettingen: 3, 15
Hamburg: 13
Heidelberg: 6, 12
Ludwigshafen: 12
Munich: 10
Tubingen: 3
ICELAND
Reykjavik: 5
IRELAND
Dublin: 6, 12
SWEDEN
Lund: 3
SWITZERLAND
Birmensdorf: 3
Lausanne: 3
Zurich: 14
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 9
London: 13
Surrey: 5
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Alabama
Birmingham: 16
Huntsville: 3
California
Berkeley: 1, 3
La Jolla: 13
Los Angeles: 9
Moss Landing: 13
Palo Alto: 3
Pasadena: 4
Walnut Creek: 3
Connecticut
New Haven: 10, 13
Hawaii
Honolulu: 13
Massachusetts
Boston: 13
Cambridge: 13
New Jersey
Princeton: 8
New York
Ithaca: 11
New York: 8, 13
North Carolina
Chapel Hill: 3
Rhode Island
Providence: 13
Tennessee
Oak Ridge: 3
West Virginia
Morgantown: 3
Wisconsin
Madison: 5
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For the UK/Europe/other countries not listed above
Katherine Anderson, Nature London
Tel: +44 20 7843 4502; E-mail [email protected]
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