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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.453 NO.7191 DATED 01 May 2008
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Immunology: A faster way to the magic bullet
Genomics: Why we are all different
Climate: Decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic
Space science: Shadows and dust
Education Special: Is our children learning?
Development: Key factor for cell migration identified
Electronics: Missing memristor is found
Superfluids: Understanding phase slips
Geochemistry: Southern anomaly goes North
And finally… Testing out a photochemical compass
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Immunology: A faster way to the magic bullet (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature06890
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 30 April 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 01 May, but at a later date. ***
A study in this week’s Nature reports a new way to generate fully human monoclonal antibodies, known by many as ‘magic bullets’ because of their ability to cure disease without side effects. The research could generate significant advances in the treatment of infectious diseases.
Patrick Wilson and colleagues isolated antibodies directly from the cellular factories producing them within weeks of vaccination — much faster than current methods that have a low success rate and can take years. The team monitored a specific type of B cell — antibody-secreting plasma cells (ASCs) — from healthy patients that had been given the influenza vaccine. Within 7 days of vaccination, on average 70% of the patients’ ASCs produced functional antibodies that recognized the strain of virus used in the vaccine.
The fact that the antibodies are fully human means that they are safer for use in humans than those generated in animals, which can induce anaphylactic shock. The findings are particularly relevant in the face of a global influenza pandemic, when the ability to produce therapeutic antibodies so quickly could be a vital tool in preventing the spread of disease.
CONTACT
Patrick Wilson (Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Oklahoma City, OK, USA)
Tel: +1 405 271 7535; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Genomics: Why we are all different (pp 56-64)
Differences between individual humans are influenced by the many variations found within their DNA, ranging from single-base changes to alterations in large chunks. A paper in this week’s Nature takes a close look at the larger variations and their potential origins and evolutionary history.
Evan Eichler and colleagues examined the complete genetic material (genomes) of eight individuals of different geographic ancestry, focusing on long variant stretches of their DNA ranging from a few thousand to a few million base pairs in length. In this small sample, the authors confirmed observations that African genomes have more diversity than other groups, but their data suggest that previous estimates of variation called ‘copy-number variants’ have been too high. Their valuable high-resolution analysis also conflicts with previous claims about the mutational processes that have shaped these chunks of the human genome.
CONTACT
Evan Eichler (Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of Washington Department of Genome Sciences, Seattle, WA, USA)
Tel: +1 206 543 9526; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Climate: Decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic (pp 84-88; N&V)
The fluctuating climate of the North Atlantic has profound consequences throughout the region, inducing changes in hurricane activity, surface temperatures and rainfall that extend from North America to Europe and Africa. In principle, these changes could be predicted if only the current state of the ocean was known, but the necessary subsurface observations are not available. A paper in this week’s Nature finds a neat way around this problem.
Noel Keenlyside and colleagues show that detailed knowledge of the ocean state is not strictly necessary for producing useful predictions of climate fluctuations on decadal timescales. Instead, their approach makes use of existing sea surface temperature observations to improve the forecasting skill of climate models.
The researchers predict that natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific oceans will, over the coming decade, temporarily offset the warming expected as a result of human activities. In fact, surface temperatures in Europe and North America may even cool slightly during this period.
CONTACT
Noel Keenlyside (Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany)
Tel: +49 431 600 4054; E-mail: [email protected]
Richard Wood (Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK) N&V author
Tel: +44 1392 886641; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Space science: Shadows and dust (pp 72-75)
Jupiter’s shadow and powerful magnetic field have been found to contribute to the formation of the planet’s outer rings. A paper in Nature this week analyses data from a traversal of the region by the spacecraft Galileo and explains why Jupiter’s outermost ring has a mysterious extended boundary.
Jupiter’s faint ring system is composed of dust particles constrained by the orbits of inner moons. There are four main components: an inner ‘halo’ ring, a thin, bright ‘main’ ring and two wide but faint ‘Gossamer’ rings made out of ejected material from the moons Amalthea and Thebe. The outermost Thebe ring is the faintest, with a barely visible continuation of the ring, known as the Thebe extension, towards its outer edge. Although previous studies have concluded that impact ejecta from the surfaces of the moons helped create the rings, scientists have been unable to explain how this particular extension was formed.
Douglas Hamilton and Harald Krüger studied dust impacts detected when the spacecraft Galileo crossed Jupiter’s outer ring region in 2002–03. They discover a gap in the rings inside Thebe’s orbit, dust grains on highly inclined paths, and a concentration of tiny dust particles inside Amalthea’s orbit. The dust grains alternately charge and discharge when crossing shadow boundaries allowing the planet’s magnetic field to excite orbital eccentricities. The authors’ modelling of this dust data indicates that it is the passage of ring particles through Jupiter’s shadow that created the Thebe extension and fully explains the Galileo results. They suggest that this form of ‘shadow resonance’ may also be able to explain some of the less understood features of Saturn’s rings.
CONTACT
Douglas Hamilton (University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA)
Tel: +1 301 405 1548; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Education Special: Is our children learning? (pp 28-32 & 35 & 37)
Does poor performance in science and mathematics testing predict the inability to compete in an innovation-based economy? No, say Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell. Placing too much emphasis on mean scores in international testing for students runs the dual-risk of ignoring the problems among low performers in the United States and overstocking the science and technology job market unnecessarily.
Europe faces a different problem, says Andrew Moore in a second commentary this week: education syllabuses in Europe have too-long ignored the contribution of molecular science to Biology’s most central tenets. “The result: students leave school without fully understanding how well supported evolutionary theory is. Worse still, the understanding they have — based on the fossil record — is easy prey to specious arguments from antiscience movements.”
In Books & Arts, Martin Kemp discusses the importance of Ogden Rood’s text on optical theory and colour perception in educating a generation of impressionist artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And John D. Barrow explores an educational exhibit on the intersection between art and mathematics.
CONTACT
Hal Salzman (The Urban Institute, Washington, DC, USA)
Tel: +1 978 929 .9503; E-mail: [email protected]
Lindsay Lowell (Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA)
Tel: +1 202 6872602; E-mail: [email protected]
Andrew Moore (European Molecular Biology Organization, Heidelberg, Germany)
Tel: +49 6221 8891 109; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Development: Key factor for cell migration identified (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature06892
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 30 April 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 01 May, but at a later date. ***
A single protein component of an enzyme is crucial for the proliferation of blood vessels to form the vascular network, biologists have discovered. Targeting this protein could also offer a way to treat cancer by preventing the formation of blood cells within tumours.
Blood-vessel growth, or angiogenesis, depends on a protein called p110alpha, report Bart Vanhaesebroeck in this week's Nature. Mouse embryos with a faulty copy of this protein developed the main blood vessels such as the aorta, but failed to develop full circulatory systems and died roughly halfway through development.
The p110alpha protein is a subunit of a class of enzyme called phosphoinositide 3-kinases (PI3Ks), which are involved in cell signalling and in directing the growth of specific tissue types. Surprisingly, however, other very closely related types of p110 are far less crucial than p110alpha, which may make this protein a tempting target for cancer drug development.
CONTACT
Bart Vanhaesebroeck (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Tel: +44 207 882 8201; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Electronics: Missing memristor is found (pp 80-83; N&V)
What is a memristor, and why hunt for it? Basic electronics courses teach that there are three fundamental passive circuit elements, namely resistors, capacitors and inductors, but rumours of a fourth, the memristor, started as long ago as 1971. A paper in this week’s Nature reports that the missing memristor has finally been found.
The long-sought memristor theoretically has interesting properties that could be valuable for electronic circuits, but until now it has not been realised in any physical system. Stanley Williams and colleagues have taken a fresh look at the notion and discovered that ‘memristance’ arises naturally in nanoscale systems where solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage.
Their results can be used to understand the wide range of electronic switching behaviour seen in a variety of nanoscale electronic devices that involve the motion of charged atoms or molecules.
CONTACT
Stanley Williams (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 650 857 6586; E-mail: [email protected]
James Tour (Rice University, Houston, TX, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 713 348 6246; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] Superfluids: Understanding phase slips (pp 76-79)
Phase slips induce dissipation in many physical systems — for example, they generate resistance in thin superconducting wires. A paper in this week’s Nature provides insight into the role of phase slips in a clean and well-characterized system — ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice.
Brian DeMarco and colleagues show that phase slips led to dissipation by measuring the damping rate of the atomic motion (analogous to electrical resistance in a solid). The results fit a model that includes finite damping at zero temperature.
The work may provide clues about dissipation in other related systems, and help, for example, in understanding the source of metallic phases in thin films. Understanding phase slips is also relevant for applications, such as standards based on quantum phase-slip junctions in nanoscale superconducting circuits.
CONTACT
Brian DeMarco (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA)
Tel: +1 217 244 9848; E-mail: [email protected]
[9] Geochemistry: Southern anomaly goes North (pp 89-93)
Geologists have discovered an abrupt geochemical boundary in the Earth’s mantle beneath the Gakkel ridge, reports a paper in Nature this week. The results also show that the mantle beneath part of the Arctic displays an isotopic signature formerly only observed in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Gakkel ridge is the slowest spreading mid-ocean ridge on Earth, extending beneath the Arctic ice cap between Greenland and Siberia. Its environment provides a unique opportunity to study melting processes in the upper mantle as the spreading rate approaches zero. Previous studies have found abrupt changes in the magmatic and tectonic style of the region, dividing it into western and eastern volcanic zones separated by a ‘sparsely magmatic zone’. From studying chemical isotope ratios and trace elements found in samples of basalt from the spreading axis in the sparsely magmatic zone, Steven Goldstein and colleagues report that an abrupt compositional boundary exists there. They found that the eastern lavas display the expected ‘Northern Hemisphere’ mantle signature, whereas western lavas show an unusual Southern Hemisphere isotopic signature — the ‘Dupal’ anomaly, whose origin is intensely debated. This is the only area outside the greater Indian Ocean where this anomaly has been detected.
The authors propose that the source of this geochemical signature is material detached from the lithospheric ‘keel’ beneath the Spitsbergen continental crust. They suggest that this keel became separated and mixed into the convecting mantle as the ocean opened between Svalbard and Greenland, and mantle from the North Atlantic entered the Arctic.
CONTACT
Steven Goldstein (Columbia University, Palisades, NY, USA)
Tel: +1 845 365 8787; E-mail: [email protected]
[10] And finally… Testing out a photochemical compass (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature06834
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 30 April 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 01 May, but at a later date. ***
Animals of many kinds — including birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, crustaceans and insects — orientate themselves with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field, but how they do this is something of a mystery. A paper in this week’s Nature tests out a model system for a chemical compass, charting a move in the right direction.
Magnetic orientation in some species, notably birds, seems to work through the eye, possibly by magnetic modulation of a light-sensitive chemical reaction. However, the Earth’s magnetic field is so weak that it was questionable whether such an effect could occur at all. In a bid to clear up this uncertainty, Peter Hore and his colleagues set up an artificial photochemical reaction system and monitored its response to a magnetic field of comparable strength to the Earth’s. They found that the reaction responded in a way consistent with the expected operation of a chemical compass.
The experiments establish the feasibility of chemical magnetoreception and give insight into the structural and dynamic design features required for optimal detection of the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field, say the authors. Scientists can now more confidently seek the mechanisms used in the real world for orientation and migration.
CONTACT
Peter Hore (University of Oxford, UK)
Tel: +44 1865 275 415; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[11] Rapid leukocyte migration by integrinindependent flowing and squeezing (pp 51-55)
[12] Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks (pp 98-101; N&V)
[13] Genome-wide screen reveals APC-associated RNAs enriched in cell protrusions (pp 115-119)
[14] Life without RNase P (pp 120-123)
[15] Structural analysis of the essential self-cleaving type III secretion proteins EscU and SpaS (pp 124-127)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 30 April 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 01 May, but at a later date. ***
[16] 3.88 Angstrom structure of cytoplasmic polyhedrosis virus by cryo-electron microscopy
DOI: 10.1038/nature06893
[17] Genetic evidence that FGFs have an instructive role in limb proximal–distal patterning
DOI: 10.1038/nature06876
[18] Single-stranded DNA-binding protein hSSB1 is critical for genomic stability
DOI: 10.1038/nature06883
[19] A novel route for ATP acquisition by the remnant mitochondria of Encephalitozoon cuniculi
DOI: 10.1038/nature06903
[20] The Cl2/H1 antiporter ClC-7 is the primary chloride permeation pathway in lysosomes
DOI: 10.1038/nature06907
[21] RNA toxicity is a component of ataxin-3 degeneration in Drosophila
DOI: 10.1038/nature06909
[22] Chemically ubiquitylated histone H2B stimulates hDot1L-mediated intranucleosomal methylation
DOI: 10.1038/nature06906
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.
AUSTRALIA
Brisbane: 18
Sydney: 18
CANADA:
Vancouver: 15
GERMANY
Freising: 11
Hamburg: 3
Hannover: 11
Heidelberg: 4, 5
Kiel: 3
Lindau: 4
Martinsried: 11
JAPAN
Kyoto: 18
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 19
Dundee: 18, 19
Edinburgh: 6
Leicester: 11
London: 6
Newcastle: 19
Oxford: 10
South Mimms: 18
St Andrews: 18
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Arizona
Tempe: 10
California
Los Angeles: 14, 16, 17
Palo Alto: 7
San Diego: 2
San Francisco: 17
Santa Clara: 2
Connecticut
New Haven: 14
District of Columbia
Washington: 5
Georgia
Atlanta: 1
Illinois
Urbana: 8
Maryland
Bethesda: 2, 20
College Park: 4
Massachusetts
Beverly: 2
Boston: 9
Cambridge: 2, 9
Michigan
Ann Arbor: 12
Missouri
St Louis: 2, 18
New Mexico
Albuquerque: 12
Santa Fe: 12
New York
New York: 18, 22
Palisades: 9
Oklahoma
Oklahoma City: 1
Tulsa: 9
Oregon
Corvallis: 9
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 21
Texas
Austin: 18
Houston: 16
Utah
Salt Lake City: 21
Virginia
Charlottesville: 13
Washington
Seattle: 2, 15
Wisconsin
Madison: 2
PRESS CONTACTS…
For North America and Canada
Katie McGoldrick, Nature Washington
Tel: +1 202 737 2355; E-mail: [email protected]
For Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and Taiwan
Mika Nakano, Nature Tokyo
Tel: +81 3 3267 8751; E-mail: [email protected]
For the UK/Europe/other countries not listed above
Jen Middleton, Nature London
Tel: +44 20 7843 4502; E-mail [email protected]
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