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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.455 NO.7213 DATED 02 OCTOBER 2008
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Immunology: Biopsy sample sheds light on HIV-1 evolution
Feature: HIV on the march in China
Quantum information: Magnetic imaging and sensing using diamond spins
Climate change: The glaciation threshold
Molecular biology: An earlier dawn for microRNAs
Astrophysics: Measuring the magnetic field of a distant galaxy
Microbiology: Knock-out blow for Chlamydia
And finally… Evolution in action
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] & [2] Immunology: Biopsy sample sheds light on HIV-1 evolution (pp 661-664; 613-619; 501; N&V)
Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) diversified in west-central Africa long before the recognized AIDS pandemic, a genetics study in this week’s Nature study suggests.
Michael Worobey and colleagues analysed viral sequences from a paraffin-embedded lymph node biopsy specimen collected in 1960 from a woman in what is now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. They compared this against a viral sequence from 1959 — the oldest known HIV-1 case and the only other pre-1976 HIV-1 viral sequence available to date. Their results suggest that these viruses evolved from a common ancestor circulating in the African population near the beginning of the twentieth century.
It’s thought there could be many more paraffin-embedded HIV-1-infected specimens in the archival banks of west-central African hospitals, and that these could provide a vast source of clinical material for viral genetic analyses. Resurrecting viral sequences from early African HIV-1 cases could offer insights into the evolution of pandemic AIDS viruses.
Also in this issue, a Review Article by Dan Barouch summarises the challenges and prospects of prophylactic HIV-1 vaccines, and calls for a renewed and coordinated commitment to basic research, preclinical studies and clinical trials. A Commentary also looks at how immunology approaches so far have been less than scientific.
CONTACT
Michael Worobey (University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA) Author paper [1]
Tel: +1 520 626 3456; E-mail: [email protected]
Dan Barouch (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA) Author review article [2]
Tel: +1 617 735 4546; E-mail: [email protected]
Bonnie Prescott (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA) Press office contact
Tel: +1 617 667 7306; E-mail: [email protected]
Paul Sharp (University of Edinburgh, UK) N&V co-author
Tel: +44 131 651 3684; E-mail: [email protected]
Beatrice Hahn (University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL, USA) N&V co-author
Tel: +1 205 934 0412; E-mail: [email protected]
Ruslan Medzhitov (Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA) Commentary author
Tel: +1 203 785 7541; E-mail: [email protected]
Feature: HIV on the march in China (pp 609-611)
HIV infection has spread beyond high-risk groups such as blood donors and intravenous drug users, and is now advancing in the wider population, according to comprehensive new data from the south of China.
A Feature in Nature this week describes research carried out by Linqi Zhang, from the AIDS Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, and his colleagues. It is based in part on an analysis of the results of 3.2 million blood samples from China’s Yunnan province.
Some of the biggest rises in the number of infections are among men in same-sex relationships — an 8-fold increase from 2005 to 2007 — and among women. The proportion of women of child-bearing age with HIV has doubled in the past decade. China’s health ministry estimates that as of October 2007, 700,000 infections had occurred in China.
Quoting an old Chinese saying “When there is a crisis, there is an opportunity”, the authors argue that action needs to be taken now to halt or slow down this spread.
CONTACT
Linqi Zhang (Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Beijing, China)
E-mail: [email protected]
This author is currently traveling and is best contacted by e-mail.
[3] & [4] Quantum information: Magnetic imaging and sensing using diamond spins (pp 648-651; 644-647; N&V)
Diamond crystals contain a naturally occurring defect known as a ‘nitrogen-vacancy centre’, which has unique electron-spin properties that can be manipulated and detected optically. Two papers in this week’s Nature each exploit these individual spins, one for high-resolution imaging and the other for sensing purposes.
Taking the first steps towards realizing a highly sensitive imaging technique, Fedor Jelezko and colleagues were able optically to detect single nitrogen-vacancy spins with nanometre-scale precision. They suggest that diamond nanocrystals with single nitrogen-vacancy centres might eventually be useful as magnetofluorescent markers in MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans of living cells.
Mikhail Lukin and co-workers take a different approach, looking into the possibility of magnetic sensing at room temperature by coherently controlling an individual spin in diamond. They were able to take precision measurements of very weak magnetic fields — of the order of that due to a single hydrogen ion at some 10 nanometres distance. This kind of magnetic sensor could be used in applications such as MRI of complex biological molecules with single-spin resolution and readout of quantum bits of information encoded in an electron or nuclear spin memory, suggest the authors.
CONTACT
Fedor Jelezko (University of Stutgart, Germany) Author paper [3]
Tel: +49 711 685 5276; E-mail: [email protected]
Mikhail Lukin (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) Author paper [4]
Tel: +1 617 495 2862; E-mail: [email protected]
Michael Romalis (Princeton University, NJ, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 609 258 5586; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Climate change: The glaciation threshold (pp 652-656; N&V)
Scientists have redefined the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide needed to support glaciation at the North and South poles. A paper in this week’s Nature explores the timing of the first major northern-hemispheric ice sheets, suggesting that there could have been continental ice sheets about 23 million years ago — much earlier than is generally thought.
There is clear evidence that an ice-covered Antarctica first occurred about 34 million years ago, but the glacial history of the Northern Hemisphere is much less clear. Was there an initial bipolar glaciation at the time Antarctica first became ice-bound or did ice sheets only develop in the Northern Hemisphere much later on? Most evidence suggests the latter, with extensive northern-hemispheric glaciation being limited to the past 3 million years.
Robert DeConto and colleagues used numerical isotope models to track the extent of the ice sheets globally with declining levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, while taking into account the effects of orbital forcing. Their model suggests that continental-scale Antarctic glaciation developed as carbon dioxide levels dropped below 750 parts per million by volume (as happened about 34 million years ago) but that the threshold for significant ice-sheet development in the Northern Hemisphere is much lower, at 280 parts per million by volume. So while a major bipolar glaciation is unlikely to have occurred straightaway, substantial ice growth in the Northern Hemisphere still might have started up to 20 million years earlier than previously believed.
CONTACT
Robert DeConto (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 413 545 3426; E-mail: [email protected]
Stephen Pekar (Queens College, Flushing, NY) N&V author
Tel: +1 718 997 3305; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Molecular biology: An earlier dawn for microRNAs (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature07415
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 01 October 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 02 October, but at a later date. ***
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) — short, single-stranded RNA molecules that regulate gene expression — may have evolved much earlier than was previously thought, a paper in this week’s Nature indicates.
David Bartel and colleagues found that miRNAs are present in a variety of primitive multicellular animals, such as the sponge Amphimedon queenslandica and starlet sea anemone Nematostella vectensis. Because these animals represent some of the earliest multicellular life forms, the findings go against the current view that holds that miRNAs arose much later, when multicellular animals became bilaterally symmetrical. The results suggest that the regulatory miRNA pathway evolved alongside multicellularity, although the machinery has subsequently been lost in some lineages.
CONTACT
David Bartel (Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 258 5287; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Astrophysics: Measuring the magnetic field of a distant galaxy (pp 638-640)
The magnetic field pervading our Galaxy is a crucial feature of the gas medium between the stars. A paper in this week's Nature now reports the measurement of a much stronger magnetic field in another, cosmologically somewhat distant galaxy, which may have played an important role in that galaxy's evolution.
A galaxy’s ‘distance’ is determined from its redshift, which is a direct measure of the apparent speed at which the galaxy is receding from us as the Universe expands. Although there have been previous reports of magnetic fields in galaxies at moderate to high redshifts, they were based on indirect measurements that did not allow the field strength to be determined with much precision. Arthur Wolfe and his colleagues present a precise measurement of a magnetic field in a distant galaxy corresponding to a redshift of 0.692.
The magnetic field is unexpectedly strong — many times stronger than in our Galaxy. The team speculate that the presence of such a highly magnetized gas in one galaxy might explain the low rate of star formation that occurs in certain types of distant galaxies, if they also have stronger-than-expected fields.
CONTACT
Arthur Wolfe (University of California, San Diego, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 619 534 7435; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] Microbiology: Knock-out blow for Chlamydia (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature07355
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 01 October 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 02 October, but at a later date. ***
A chemical 'knock out' technique has been used to demonstrate the role of a specific chlamydial protein in virulence. It's hoped the approach will help identify virulence factors in other bacterial species, and that it could also be used to identify therapeutically useful compounds.
Chlamydia pneumoniae infects humans and is a major cause of pneumonia. But it's difficult to work out exactly how the bacterium infects its host, as the pathogen cannot currently be genetically manipulated. In Nature online this week, Stephen Lory and colleagues describe a chemical 'knock out' technique that targets proteins rather than genes, revealing a bacterial protein called CopN that is involved in chlamydial infectivity.
CONTACT
Stephen Lory (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 432 5099; E-mail: [email protected]
[9] And finally… Evolution in action (pp 620-626; N&V)
A group of colourful cichlid fishes in Lake Victoria have diverged into different species after changes in how they were able to see led to changes in the mates that they selected. The fish provide the best documented example of species formation due to changes in the senses rather than geographical separation.
The cichlid fish of African lakes are textbook examples of rapid speciation but the mechanisms involved remain elusive. In Nature this week, Ole Seehausen and colleagues identify the ecological and molecular basis of divergent evolution in the visual system of Lake Victoria cichlid fishes, leading to sensory drive speciation without geographical isolation. As well as providing clear evidence that speciation can occur by sensory drive in the absence of geographical segregation, this work provides a mechanistic explanation for the collapse of cichlid fish species diversity during the anthropogenic eutrophication of Lake Victoria.
CONTACT
Ole Seehausen (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Kastanienbaum, Switzerland)
Tel: +41 41 349 2111; E-mail: [email protected]
Mark Kirkpatrick (University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA) N&V co-author
Tel: +1 512 471 5858; E-mail: [email protected]
Trevor Price (University of Chicago, IL, USA) N&V co-author
Tel: +1 858 531 0443; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[10] Clustered star formation as a natural explanation for the Ha cut-off in disk galaxies (pp 641-643)
[11] Crystallographic preferred orientation of a kimotoite and seismic anisotropy of Tonga slab (pp 657-660)
[12] Visualizing transient events in amino-terminal autoprocessing of HIV-1 protease (pp 693-696)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 01 October 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 02 October, but at a later date. ***
[13] Squeezing and entanglement in a Bose–Einstein condensate
DOI: 10.1038/nature07332
[14] Oligopotent stem cells are distributed throughout the mammalian ocular surface
DOI: 10.1038/nature07406
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: 6
Perth: 1
BELGIUM
Antwerp: 1
Braine-l’Alleud: 1
CANADA:
Montreal: 9
DENMARK
Copenhagen: 1
FRANCE
Lyon: 1
GERMANY
Bonn: 10
Heidelberg: 13
Kiel: 3
Konstanz: 3
Stuttgart: 3
JAPAN
Chiba: 11
Fukuoka: 9, 11
Kyoto: 9
Sendai: 11
Yokohama: 9
NETHERLANDS
Leiden: 9
REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
Kinshasa: 1
SWITZERLAND
Bern: 9
Kastanienbaum: 9
Lausanne: 14
TANZANIA
Mwanza: 9
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 9
Cardiff: 5
Southampton: 5
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Arizona
Tucson: 1
California
Berkeley: 6, 7
La Jolla: 7
Santa Cruz: 7
Walnut Creek: 6
Connecticut
New Haven: 5
Illinois
Chicago: 1
Maryland
Bethesda: 12
College Park: 9
Massachusetts
Amherst: 5
Boston: 2, 8
Cambridge: 4, 6
Waltham: 3
Missouri
Columbia: 12
Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh: 4
University Park: 5
Texas
Austin: 9
College Station: 3
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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