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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.459 NO.7249 DATED 18 JUNE 2009
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Genetics: Copy number variation linked to childhood brain tumour
Microbiology: New antimicrobial function for tissue-remodelling protein
Essay: The mystery ape of Pleistocene Asia
Climate change: Seasonality increase preceded ancient big freeze
Cancer: Getting into the CNS
Infectious diseases: Malaria parasite uses novel protein export machine
Planetary science: Io in equilibrium
Quantum mechanics: Measuring miniscule motion
And finally… A dinosaur in the hand
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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Genetics: Copy number variation linked to neuroblastoma (pp 987-991)
The presence of a particular DNA copy number variant (CNV) may be associated with the development of an aggressive, often fatal type of childhood cancer of the sympathetic nervous system, a Nature paper suggests
CNVs, changes in the copy number of specific DNA segments, stand alongside the better known single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) as significant sources of genetic diversity. However, whereas certain SNPs have been found to contribute to cancer susceptibility, the role of CNVs remains less clear.
Here, John Maris and colleagues performed a genome-wide association study in patients with neuroblastoma — a cancer of the sympathetic nerve cells that control our fight or flight response and most commonly affects young children. They find that a common, heritable CNV found on chromosome 1 is frequently associated with the disease. The team highlights the presence of a previously unknown neuroblastoma-related gene within the CNV that is preferentially expressed in fetal brain and sympathetic nerve tissues. It’s thought that this gene may be implicated in the early stages of tumour development.
CONTACT
John Maris (The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA)
Tel: +1 215 590 5242; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Microbiology: New antimicrobial function for tissue-remodelling protein (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature08181
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 17 June 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 18 June, but at a later date. ***
A protein involved in tissue remodelling also has potent antimicrobial effects, finds a study published online this week in Nature. With antibiotic resistance ever on the increase, the discovery could provide an additional weapon in the continued war against microbial invaders.
MMP12, also known as macrophage elastase, belongs to the matrix metalloproteinase family and has been linked with diseases such as emphysema and arthritis as a result of its role in tissue remodelling. The protein is naturally produced by macrophages — a type of immune cell that patrols the body, engulfing rogue bacterial cells. A. McGarry Houghton and colleagues now show that macrophages can also use MMP12 to directly kill bacteria they have ingested. This finding is surprising because matrix metalloproteinases were previously thought to function exclusively outside of the cell, thus adding MMP12 to the arsenal of toxic substances that macrophages carry to kill invading microbes.
The team determined that the antimicrobial activity of MMP12 is performed by a part of the protein separate from the enzyme region that it is involved in tissue remodelling. It seems to work by sticking onto bacterial walls and disrupting their membranes, which ultimately causes bacterial death. Notably, the protein is effective against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, the two main classes of bacterial cell wall.
CONTACT
A. McGarry Houghton (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
Tel: +1 412 383 8944; E-mail: [email protected]
Essay: The mystery ape of Pleistocene Asia (pp 910-911)
Have fossils found in Asian sites been mislabelled as human, when actually they belong to an unknown ape? Anthropologist Russell Ciochon thinks so - even though he was one of the co-describers of an important early hominin find in China, and he explains why in an Essay in Nature this week.
In a 1995 Nature paper, a team including Ciochon reported that a human jaw fragment found in Longgupo cave, southern China, was 1.9 million years old and related to Homo habilis - an African species that pre-dates Homo erectus. This was almost a million years earlier than the accepted date at which humans were thought to have arrived in that part of the world. And it hinted that H. erectus was not the founding species in Asia.
But, after more than a decade of further work, Ciochon thinks the Longgupo remains probably weren't human, but rather a mystery ape. If so, he writes in a personal essay this week, this means H. erectus was first in Asia after all, arriving perhaps 1.6 million years ago. Ciochon thinks that early humans didn't live in the densely forested areas of Asia or Africa, preferring grasslands instead. It remains to be seen, says Ciochon, whether there was just one mystery ape in Pleistocene China, or many. He is now part of a team that hopes to finds out.
Fossil identification is always subject to interpretation and debate, as can be seen from the more recent controversy over Homo floresiensis, a dwarfed hominin. As always, Nature welcomes that kind of debate and Ciochon's essay is an interesting tale of how some anthropologists change their thinking over time.
CONTACT
Russell Ciochon (University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA)
Tel: +1 319 335 0534; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Climate change: Seasonality increase preceded ancient big freeze (pp 969-973)
Colder winters and warm summers heralded the switch from global greenhouse to global icehouse around 33.5 million years ago, a Nature paper suggests.
The transition from the Eocene to Oligocene epochs was accompanied by a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the appearance of continental-scale Antarctic ice sheets, but the changes in high northern latitude climates were unclear. Here, James Eldrett and colleagues analyse terrestrial spore and pollen evidence deposited in ocean sediments in the Norwegian–Greenland Sea. They find that the coldest-month mean temperatures declined by about 5 degrees Celsius before this transition with increased seasonality. The analysis is unusual in that it uses direct biological evidence, rather than isotopic inferences, and is supported by extensive climate modelling.
CONTACT
James Eldrett (Shell UK Limited, Aberdeen, UK)
Tel: +44 1224 881217; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Cancer: Getting into the CNS (pp 1000-1004)
Clues as to how leukaemia cells can get into the central nervous system (CNS) are reported this week in Nature. It’s hoped that the findings could reveal new drug targets to stop cancer spread.
T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) is a blood cancer that mainly affects children and adolescents, and is often associated with spread to the CNS. Patients are usually given intensive irradiation to the brain in attempt to prevent this — a drastic measure for which the increase in survival is thought to outweigh the significant side-effects.
Iannis Aifantis and colleagues developed a mouse model of T-ALL to explore the signals that help these cancer cells to cross into the CNS. They show that the chemokine receptor CCR7 is crucial for getting the T-ALL cells into the CNS. The binding partner of CCR7, CCL19, is also implicated, and the authors believe that blocking their interaction opens an exciting therapeutic window for preventing CNS spread.
CONTACT
Iannis Aifantis (New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA)
Tel: +1 212 263 5365; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Infectious diseases: Malaria parasite uses novel protein export machine (pp 945-949; N&V)
The malaria parasite uses a novel bit of trafficking machinery to export its protein cargo into host red blood cells, a Nature paper reveals. Drugs that target this complex may prove useful therapeutically.
Malaria parasites reside in membrane-bound bubbles, called vacuoles, inside infected cells. Parasite proteins therefore have to be exported across two membranes — the parasite membrane and the vacuole membrane — before they reach the cell interior where they can take effect. Whilst the mechanism for exporting proteins across the parasite membrane has been known for some time, how they get out of the vacuole and into the cell has been less clear. Brendan Crabb and colleagues now describe a new protein-exporting complex called PTEX, which is found within the vacuole membrane. PTEX is made up of a handful of proteins that join together to make the exporting machinery.
It’s thought that hundreds of malaria parasite proteins may be exported into the host red blood cells via this route, and that the process is crucial to the virulence and viability of the parasite. PTEX is also of interest because it represents a type of protein trafficking apparatus that has not been identified before.
CONTACT
Brendan Crabb (Burnet Institute, Melbourne, Australia)
Tel: +61 3 9282 2123; E-mail: [email protected]
Boris Striepen (University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 706 583 0588; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Planetary science: Io in equilibrium (pp 957-959; N&V)
Io may be close to thermal equilibrium, according to a study published this week in Nature. The finding has implications for understanding how the orbits of Jupiter and its moons are evolving.
Io is Jupiter’s innermost moon, and is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. Its geological activity is thought to be the result of tidal heating from friction generated by the pull of Jupiter's gravity. But it’s not known whether this internally generated tidal heat is high enough to generate the heat flow observed on Io’s surface.
Using astronomic observations made between 1891 and 2007, Valery Lainey and colleagues have estimated the dissipation of tidal energy in Io by tracking its effect on the orbital motions of the innermost Galilean moons. For Io, the value is in good agreement with the observed surface heat flow and suggests that Io is close to thermal equilibrium. Jupiter’s tidal dissipation is close to the upper bound of its average value, as would be expected from the long-term evolution of the system.
CONTACT
Valery Lainey (Observatoire de Paris, France)
Tel: +33 1 40 51 22 72; E-mail: [email protected]
Gerald Schubert (University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 310 825 4577; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Quantum mechanics: Measuring miniscule motion (pp 960-964; N&V)
Fabricating tiny mechanical structures with vibrational motion that is purely quantum mechanical is a long-standing goal in physics. A parallel goal is the development of a tool for observing and controlling such tiny quantum motions.
Even though it is now relatively straightforward to make a miniscule mechanical oscillator, the vibrations of such structures still tend to be dominated by thermal rather than quantum effects. Additionally, as a system reaches quantum states, a second difficulty arises — the vibrational motions are so miniscule that it is difficult to observe and control them.
Michael Roukes and colleagues coupled a tiny mechanical resonator to a superconducting quantum system, called a qubit. As reported online in this week’s Nature, the scientists could then measure the quantum state of the qubit by observing the subtle changes that it induced in the vibration of the resonator. Once the wider goal of achieving quantum motion has been achieved, this type of coupling between a resonator and qubit could be used as a highly sensitive sensor, measuring and controlling tiny quantum motions.
CONTACT
Michael Roukes (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 626 395 2916; E-mail: [email protected]
Pertti Hakonen (Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland) N&V author
Tel: +358 9 451 2964; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] And finally… A dinosaur in the hand (pp 940-944)
Prolific fossil hunter Xing Xu and colleagues might have solved the problem of how modern bird wings derived from dinosaur digits. The discovery of a small, primitive, herbivorous theropod from the Jurassic period, found in the Junggar Basin of western China, gives a snapshot of how dinosaur hand-to-wing evolution may have happened.
The idea that the dinosaurs live on, as birds, is widely accepted. But there is a nagging problem: the bird hand, which is now reduced and embedded in the wing, is thought to derive from the second, third and fourth digits of an ancestral five-digit hand. In theropod dinosaurs, however, the three digits are thought to be the first, second and third; in which case, how could the transition have taken place? This newly discovered primitive theropod, described in this week’s Nature, is approximately 155 million years old and has a greatly reduced first digit alongside more fully developed second, third and fourth digits. The wrist bones of this dinosaur are more like those associated with digits two, three and four, but the finger bones themselves are more like the first, second and third digits.
The authors argue that hand-to-wing evolution involved complex developmental shifts in the wrist and fingers, and this dinosaur allows a glimpse of this change as it happened.
CONTACT
Xing Xu (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China)
Tel: +86 10 8836 9196; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[9] Peierls Distortion as a route to High Thermoelectric Performance in In4Se3-δ Crystals (pp 965-968)
[10] Creep cavitation can establish a dynamic granular fluid pump in ductile shear zones (pp 974-977)
[11] Colorado Plateau magmatism and uplift by warming of heterogeneous lithosphere (pp 978-982)
[12] Structure and mechanism of a bacterial light-regulated cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase (pp 1015-1018)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 17 June 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 18 June, but at a later date. ***
[13] Adaptive Prediction of Environmental Changes by Micro-Organisms
DOI: 10.1038/nature08112
[14] Unlimited multistability in multisite phosphorylation systems
DOI: 10.1038/nature08102
[15] The pluripotency factor, Oct4, interacts with Ctcf and also controls X chromosome pairing and counting
DOI: 10.1038/nature08098
[16] Ago HITS-CLIP decodes miRNA-mRNA interaction maps
DOI: 10.1038/nature08170
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
Geelong: 5
Melbourne: 5
Perth: 10
BELGIUM
Brussels: 6
CANADA:
Brandon: 3
Drumheller: 8
CHINA
Beijing: 8
Karamay: 8
Nanning: 8
Wuhan: 8
FRANCE
Paris: 6
GERMANY
Berlin: 4
Heidelberg: 12
ISRAEL
Rehovot: 13
Tel Aviv: 13
ITALY
Rome: 1
MEXICO
Mexico City: 8
SOUTH KOREA
Pohang: 9
Suwon: 9
Yongin: 9
SPAIN
Barcelona: 2
UNITED KINGDOM
Aberdeen: 3
London: 1
Southampton: 3
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Los Angeles: 11
Pasadena: 7
District of Columbia
Washington: 8
Florida
Gainesville: 1
Tallahassee: 8
Illinois
Argonne: 10
Indiana
West Lafayette: 3
Massachusetts
Boston: 2, 13, 14, 15
New Jersey
Piscataway: 9
New Mexico
Albuquerque: 11
New York
New York: 4, 8, 16
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 1
Utah
Utah: 11
Wyoming
Laramie: 12
PRESS CONTACTS…
From North America and Canada
Neda Afsarmanesh, 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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