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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.453 NO.7194 DATED 22 May 2008
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Astronomy: Outburst marking the birth of a supernova
Neuroscience: Molecular clues to appetite and drug addiction
Volcanology: Magma can directly produce earthquakes
Antivirals: Target identified for dengue therapy
Optical materials: A trick of light
Stem cells: Getting to grips with self-renewal
Immunology: How a vaccine enhancer
Climate science: Tracking extreme conditions
And finally… A Texan fossil astride the amphibian gap
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Astronomy: Outburst marking the birth of a supernova (pp 469-474; N&V)
The most massive stars end their short lives in a spectacular explosion — and a supernova is born. A paper in this week’s Nature reports the discovery of a supernova at its birth.
Supernovae are rare, with only a few expected each century in any given galaxy, but they can be seen in many distant galaxies because of their intense brightness. Because observers can’t pick up this optical emission until several hours to days after the explosion, a supernova’s first moments are somewhat shrouded in mystery.
Alicia Soderberg and her colleagues serendipitously witnessed a supernova at the time of explosion by capturing an extremely luminous X-ray outburst marking the event, while studying the X-ray emission from a supernova that had gone off a month earlier in the same galaxy. They attribute the outburst to the breaking out of the supernova shock wave through a dense wind surrounding the progenitor star.
The authors suggest that future X-ray surveys could reveal the births of many more supernovae, providing deeper insight into the shock wave that ejects much of the star's mass into space.
CONTACT
Alicia Soderberg (Princeton University, NJ, USA)
Tel: +1 626 676 4723; E-mail: [email protected]
Roger Chevalier (University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 434 924 4889; E-mail: [email protected]
Please note a press briefing will be held by Princeton University on 21 May, at 1300 hours US Eastern Time. For further information, please contact:
Kitta MacPherson (Princeton University, USA)
Tel: +1 609 258 5729; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Neuroscience: Molecular clues to appetite and drug addiction (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature06994
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 21 May 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 22 May, but at a later date. ***
Researchers have discovered a new molecular mechanism that underpins the brain's responses to food and drugs of abuse, such as cocaine. Mice with a particular mutation in this pathway are less enthusiastic about seeking food and show reduced responses to addictive drugs.
Both food and addictive drugs trigger the accumulation of a protein called DARPP-32 in the nuclei of brain cells involved in the brain's reward systems, report researchers led by Jean-Antoine Girault in this week’s Nature. This protein seems to be a key component of the signalling pathway by which the brain learns that such substances are pleasurable.
Girault’s team also pinpoint a region of the DARPP-32 protein that seems to be critical to its function. Mice with a specific error in the sequence of amino acids that makes up this protein were less likely to show obsessive food- or drug-seeking behaviour — for example, they gave up more easily in ‘nose-poke’ trials, in which they have to poke a lever to get food, and the number of pokes required is then increased.
CONTACT
Jean-Antoine Girault (Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France)
Tel: +33 1 45 87 12 52; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] & [4] Volcanology: Magma can directly produce earthquakes (pp 507-510; 511-514)
Two papers in this week’s Nature indicate that volcanic earthquakes are not always induced by the impact of moving magma on cool rocks, as previously presumed. They show that fracturing and faulting within the eruptible magma itself can generate seismic events.
Hugh Tuffen and colleagues deform hot magmas under simulated volcanic conditions and detect acoustic emissions that are indicative of seismogenic rupture. Yan Lavallée and co-workers perform rheological experiments on volcanic dome lavas, finding evidence that they are seismogenic, and that the character of the seismicity changes as the lavas cross from the ductile to the brittle regime.
The authors suggest that monitoring such magma seismicity might therefore help to improve forecasting for some volcanic eruptions.
CONTACT
Yan Lavallée (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany) Author paper 3
Tel: +49 89 2180 4258; E-mail: [email protected]
Hugh Tuffen (Lancaster University, UK) Author paper 4
Tel: +44 1524 594713; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Antivirals: Target identified for dengue therapy (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature07013
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 21 May 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 22 May, but at a later date. ***
Scientists have identified a molecule targeted by dengue virus in mice to bring about the haemorrhagic fever associated with lethal disease. The research, reported online this week in Nature, could help the development of therapeutic agents for this and other viral diseases.
Dengue is mosquito borne and infects at least 50 million people a year, but little is known about how the virus causes disease. Shie-Liang Hsieh and colleagues show that it hijacks the CLEC5A molecule on immune cells to cause a massive release of potent inflammatory agents known as cytokines. These cytokines are probably responsible for the inappropriate inflammation that causes haemorrhagic fever.
Using antibodies to block the interaction between CLEC5A and dengue virus, the team found that they could prevent inflammation without affecting the normal immune response to virus infection. What’s more, 50% of mice treated with these antibodies managed to clear the virus. This ability to control inflammation and simultaneously maintain natural viral immunity makes CLEC5A an exciting prospect for the development of treatment agents, say the authors.
CONTACT
Shie-Liang Hsieh (National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan)
Tel: +886 2 2826 7161; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Optical materials: A trick of light (pp 495-498)
Light waves move through a semi-transparent material using a jittery type of motion known as a ‘random walk’. A paper in this week’s Nature devises an optical material in which this motion is modified in an interesting way.
An extension of the random walk is the Lévy flight, in which the moving entity can occasionally take unusually large steps — thereby changing the overall transport properties of the system. Scientists have recorded Lévy flights in the patterns followed by animals searching for food, in human travel distribution and even in earthquake behaviour. What Pierre Barthelemy and his colleagues have done is to engineer this quirky motion in an optical material, causing light waves to perform a Lévy flight rather than undergoing regular light diffusion.
Their experimental system is ideal for studying Lévy flights because it is easy to fine-tune the parameters triggering this type of transport. The authors’ findings open up the possibility of developing new functional optical materials.
CONTACT
Diederik Wiersma (European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy, Florence, Italy)
Tel: +39 055 457 2492; Mobile: +39 340 3197452; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Stem cells: Getting to grips with self-renewal (pp 519-523)
Embryonic stem cell (ESC) renewal does not rely on instructions from outside the cell and can be enabled by eliminating internal factors that induce differentiation, according to research in this week’s Nature.
It is 30 years since pluripotent mouse ESCs were first described, and various combinations of feeder cells, growth factors, hormones and serums have been used to maintain their undifferentiated state. Austin Smith and colleagues have studied mouse ESCs in a variety of culture conditions and show that ESC self-renewal does not rely on extrinsic instruction. Inhibition of factors that induce differentiation enables self-renewal, suggesting that the ground state of the ESC in the absence of external instruction is self-renewal. Such self-sufficiency is more like that of a unicellular organism than the interdependence we expect of regular metazoan cells. The authors believe that such minimal requirements provide a basis for the precise description and dissection of the pluripotent state.
CONTACT
Austin Smith (Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research, University of Cambridge, UK)
Tel: +44 1223 760233; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] Immunology: How a vaccine enhancer works (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature06939
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 21 May 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 22 May, but at a later date. ***
For more than eighty years vaccines have been administered along with alum — an aluminium salt known as an adjuvant — because it somehow boosted the biological agent’s effect in stimulating a protection response by the recipient’s immune system. A paper in this week’s Nature finally reveals how this simple chemical accomplishes this remarkable feat across the board for different vaccines.
Richard Flavell and his colleagues show that aluminium adjuvants activate Nalp3, a component of the inflammasome — a system that controls the production of specific cytokines, which are crucial molecular mediators of the immune response. Nalp3 is a member of a class of cellular receptors known as NOD-like receptors that pick up on signs of cell damage — in this case, it is the insoluble aluminium particles in the adjuvant that call in the defence after the vaccine’s biological agent has raised the alarm.
As the authors point out, understanding how this widely used adjuvant acts on the immune system to enhance vaccine efficacy could help in the design of more powerful, more specific adjuvants that exploit the same biochemical pathway as alum.
CONTACT
Richard Flavell (Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA)
Tel: +1 203 737 2216; E-mail: [email protected]
[9] Climate science: Tracking extreme conditions (pp 504-506)
Scientists report a new method for measuring the isotopic composition of atmospheric oxygen throughout geologic history, reports a paper in Nature this week. The method, which can also be used as a proxy for carbon dioxide concentrations, should prove useful when evaluating extreme changes in climatic conditions, such as the global meltdown that occurred after the ‘Snowball Earth’ period, about 635 million years ago.
Rock and mineral deposits can reveal a wealth of information about the history of the solid Earth, but similar records for the atmosphere are scarce. Geologists tend to use sedimentary minerals, fossils and geochemical models to place constraints on the concentrations of carbon dioxide, oxygen or methane in the past.
Huiming Bao and colleagues analysed a record of triple oxygen isotope composition from sulphate deposits, and focused on a series of negative anomalies in the data. They propose that these anomalies track those of atmospheric oxygen, and in turn reflect the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere via a network of chemical reactions. They find that carbon dioxide levels were much higher in the early Cambrian than in younger eras and that the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the immediate aftermath of the Snowball Earth glaciation was at its highest level in the past 750 million years.
CONTACT
Huiming Bao (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA)
Tel: +1 225 578 3419; E-mail: [email protected]
[10] And finally… A Texan fossil astride the amphibian gap (pp 515-518)
The origin of today’s amphibians — frogs, salamanders and the earthworm-like caecilians, for example — is a controversial question in vertebrate evolution because of missing information linking them to fossil forms. A paper in this week’s Nature describes an unusual fossil from the Early Permian period, before the first dinosaurs appeared, that could help to fill the gap.
Jason Anderson and colleagues found their fossil in Texas. It has the chassis of an archaic amphibian known as a temnospondyl, but also has many of the characteristic features seen in modern frogs, toads and salamanders. The fossil indicates that modern amphibians may have come from two groups, with frogs, toads and salamanders related to temnospondyls, and caecilians more closely related to the lepospondyls, another group of archaic amphibians.
CONTACT
Jason Anderson (University of Calgary, Canada)
Tel: +1 403 210 8661; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[11] Mechanism of shape determination in motile cells (pp 475-480; N&V)
[12] Proteasome subunit Rpn13 is a novel ubiquitin receptor (pp 481-488; N&V)
[13] Mechanism of homologous recombination from the RecA–ssDNA/dsDNA structures (pp 489-494; N&V)
[14] Gelation of particles with short-range attraction (pp 499-503)
[15] Transcriptome-wide noise controls lineage choice in mammalian progenitor cells (pp 544-547)
[16] Ubiquitin docking at the proteasome through a novel pleckstrin-homology domain interaction (pp 548-552; N&V)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 21 May 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 22 May, but at a later date. ***
[17] Structural basis for the regulated protease and chaperone function of DegP
DOI: 10.1038/nature07004
[18] Translation factors promote the formation of two states of the closed-loop mRNP
DOI: 10.1038/nature06974
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.
AUSTRIA
Vienna: 17
CANADA:
Calgary: 10, 15
Hamilton: 7
Mississauga: 10
Quebec: 10
Toronto: 1, 7
CHINA
Nanjing: 1, 9
CROATIA
Split: 12, 16
FRANCE
Grenoble: 2
Paris: 2
GERMANY
Berlin: 16
Essen: 17
Frankfurt: 12, 16
Garching: 1, 16
Köln: 12
Munich: 3
ISRAEL
Haifa: 11
Rehovot: 1
ITALY
Florence: 6
Rome: 14
JAPAN
Fukuoka: 2
NETHERLANDS
Amsterdam: 1
SOUTH AFRICA
Krugersdorp: 1
TAIWAN
Hsinchu: 1
Hualien: 5
Tainan: 5
Taipei: 5
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 7
Dorking: 1
Dundee: 7
Edinburgh: 14
Lancaster: 4
Leicester: 1
London: 3, 4, 15, 17
Southampton: 1
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Arizona
Tucson: 1
California
Berkeley: 1
Davis: 11
Los Angeles: 7, 9
Pasadena: 1
Santa Bernadino: 10
Stanford: 11
Connecticut
New Haven: 2, 8, 11
Illinois
Chicago: 1
Iowa
Iowa City: 8
Louisiana
Baton Rouge: 9
Maryland
Columbia: 1
Greenbelt: 1
Massachusetts
Boston: 12, 15, 16
Cambridge: 14, 15
Worcester: 18
Minnesota
Minneapolis: 12, 16
New Hampshire
Hanover: 1
New Jersey
Princeton: 1
New York
New York: 2, 13
Pennsylvania
University Park: 1
South Carolina
Clemson: 1
Texas
Austin: 1
Virginia
Charlottesville: 1
Wisconsin
Madison: 1, 11
PRESS CONTACTS…
From North America and Canada
Katherine Anderson, Nature New York
Tel: +1 212 726 9231; E-mail: [email protected]
Katie McGoldrick, Nature Washington
Tel: +1 202 737 2355; E-mail: [email protected]
From Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and Taiwan
Mika Nakano, Nature Tokyo
Tel: +81 3 3267 8751; E-mail: [email protected]
From 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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