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This press release is copyright Nature.
VOL.464 NO.7289 DATED 01 APRIL 2010
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Genetics: Hitting the right notes
Opinion: The Human Genome at Ten
News features: The Human Genome at Ten — growing numbers, growing complexity
Drug discovery: Trimming the fat
Earth science: The cool of the Sun
Neuroscience: Long-range connectivity dampened in schizophrenia
Biology: Mice lack the muscle for exercise
Physics: Putting the squeeze on quantum measurement
Physics: A new twist on electron beams
Neuroscience: Which comes first, the caspases or the tau?
And finally… Unlikely movie stars yield secrets of gene function
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Genetics: Hitting the right notes (pp 757-762)
Scientists have sequenced the genome of the zebra finch, and publish the results in Nature this week. The research shows that song behaviour engages with most of the genes expressed in the bird’s brain, and identifies potential genetic substrates for the evolution of vocal communication.
The zebra finch is a model for the study of vertebrate brain, behaviour and evolution, with unique relevance in human neuroscience. Wesley Warren and colleagues compare the results with the chicken genome, the only bird to have been sequenced until now. Their paper shows that genes with neural function that are implicated in the cognitive processing of song have been rapidly evolving in the finch lineage. They believe that dynamic and serendipitous aspects of the genome may have unexpected roles in the elaborate vocal communicative capabilities of songbirds.
CONTACT
Wesley Warren (Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, USA)
Tel: +1 314 286 1899; E-mail: [email protected]
Opinion: The Human Genome at Ten (pp 674-679)
As scientists prepare to celebrate ten years since the draft human genome was announced in June 2000, Nature asks whether the sequence has delivered the insights that were anticipated. What lessons have been learned from the first post-genome decade?
Francis Collins and Craig Venter agree, in two Opinion pieces, that this era has seen a breathtaking acceleration in genome science and sequencing technology. Collins gives his five lessons learned from the past decade’s research for the one to come, after resurrecting the PowerPoint file in which he made predictions for 2010 based on the human genome. They have come true he says, but “it is fair to say that the Human Genome Project has not yet directly affected the health care of most individuals”.
Venter predicts that sequencing will soon become a commodity, that collection of phenotypic information and computational power are becoming the bottlenecks, and that ten years from now “we will move beyond the current goal of one genome per person to sequencing multiple genomes per person” from different cell types.
In an accompanying Opinion debate, Todd Golub and Robert Weinberg explore whether advances in cancer research will be powered by capturing the big picture or experimenting on the details. Golub argues that genomics is the way forward for cancer therapeutics; Weinberg rails against the redirection of funding for uncertain return, and warns against abandoning basic experimental skills necessary to explore individual components of tumour systems.
CONTACT
Francis Collins (National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA)
Please contact via:
Calvin Jackson (Office of Communications & Public Liaison, National Institutes of Health)
Tel: +1 301 496 5787; E-mail: [email protected]
J. Craig Venter (J. Craig Venter Institute, Rockville, MD, USA)
Tel: +1 240 268 2750; E-mail: [email protected]
Please contact via:
Heather Kowalski (Kowalski Communications)
Tel: +1 301 943 8879; E-mail: [email protected]
Todd Golub (Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA, USA)
Please contact via:
Nicole Davis (Director of External Communications, Broad Institute)
Tel: +1 617 714 7050; E-mail: [email protected]
Robert Weinberg (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 258 5159; E-mail: [email protected]
News features: The Human Genome at Ten — growing numbers, growing complexity
In June 2000, when the draft human genome was announced, eight billion base pairs of sequence In June 2000, when the draft human genome was announced, 8 billion base pairs of sequence were in the main sequence databases. Ten years on 280 billion base pairs have been submitted. A graphic spread in Nature this week illustrates a decade of genetic sequencing in startlingly large numbers.
But the human genome sequence and the subsequent data deluge have not necessarily led to greater clarity in biology. In a News Feature, Erika Check Hayden asks why biology always appears more complicated the closer that scientists look, and whether simplifying principles can be extracted from the mushrooming complexity.
Finally, in a second News Feature, Alison Abbott talks to five of those who were in the thick of the human genome race about the rivalries and challenges they faced at the time.
Nature is launching an online survey of scientists to gauge where the human genome sequence has had the greatest impact. The survey will be at: http://www.nature.com/humangenomesurvey from 18:00 London time on Wednesday 31 March.
CONTACT
For background information on these features, please contact the Nature press office.
[2] Drug discovery: Trimming the fat (pp 728-732; N&V)
‘Sleeping sickness’, also known as human African trypanosomiasis, is responsible for approximately 30,000 deaths each year. The parasite that causes this disease is predominantly found in the developing world, and — like many other ‘neglected diseases’ — there is a shortage of inexpensive, efficacious drugs available to combat this illness.
In this week's issue of Nature, Paul Wyatt and colleagues discovered an inhibitor of N-myristoyltransferase, the enzyme that covalently links myristic acid, a fatty acid, to specific proteins to ensure that they are localized to the cellular membrane. The authors show that this inhibitor leads to rapid killing of trypanosomes both in vitro and in vivo and cures trypanosomiasis in mice.
Since there are so few treatments that are available to treat this disease, the authors hope that an optimized version of this compound — or other inhibitors that selectively target this enzyme — could be developed, potentially generating inexpensive treatments for people infected with African trypanosomiasis in the developing world.
CONTACT
Paul Wyatt (University of Dundee, UK)
Tel: +44 1382 386231; E-mail: [email protected]
George Cross (Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA) N&V Author
Tel: +1 212 327 7571; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Earth science: The cool of the Sun (pp 744-747; N&V)
Possible solutions to the faint early or 'young' Sun paradox, proposed by Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972, are still debated today. In Nature this week, researchers present a new explanation for the combination of low solar luminosity but liquid water on the Earth in the Archaean era.
The paradox points out that solar luminosity during the Archaean was about 70% of today’s, so the Earth’s surface would have been too cold for the oceans to be liquid. Yet the geological record shows that liquid water was present. This is usually explained as the consequence of a greenhouse effect caused by a high concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and/or methane.
Minik Rosing and colleagues suggest that there is no need to invoke greenhouse warming — and no climate paradox. They demonstrate that the mineralogy of Archaean sediments is inconsistent with high greenhouse gas concentrations and the metabolic constraints of the methanogens of the time. They hypothesize that a lower solar albedo of the early Earth, with little in the way of continents and more dark heat-absorbing oceans, together with a lack of biologically induced cloud condensation nuclei, were sufficient to maintain temperatures above freezing.
CONTACT
Minik Rosing (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
Tel: +45 353 22368; E-mail: [email protected]
James Kasting (Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA) N&V Author
Tel: +1 814 865 3207; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Neuroscience: Long-range connectivity dampened in schizophrenia (pp 763-767)
Disruptions in synchronous firing between the prefrontal cortex and hippocampal neurons are found in mice that model one of the strongest known genetic risk factors for schizophrenia. In a study published in this week’s Nature, scientists also found that these mice have learning and memory problems, a common difficulty for schizophrenia patients, thereby demonstrating the importance of long-range synchrony of neural activity in this disorder.
One observation in brain activity of people with schizophrenia is altered connectivity between the frontal and temporal lobes. However, it is not known if this is a cause or manifestation of schizophrenia. Because genetic disruptions associated with the disease, such as a common microdeletion on human chromosome 22, can be modelled in mice, they can be used to study specific brain mechanisms that go awry in the disorder.
Joseph Gogos, Joshua Gordon and colleagues studied memory-related neural activity in mice previously created by the group that carried chromosomal disruptions that model human schizophrenia microdeletions. In wild-type mice, neural synchrony increases between their prefrontal cortex and hippocampus — a brain area important in memory — during the memory task. However, this change in synchrony was diminished in the mutant mice. Moreover, the measure of prefrontal–hippocampal synchrony at the start of the memory training predicted how long the mutant mice would need to learn the task.
CONTACT
Joseph Gogos (Columbia University, New York, NY, USA) Co-author
Tel: +1 646 361 4850; E-mail: [email protected]
Joshua Gordon (Columbia University, New York, NY, USA) Co-author
Tel: +1 212 568 4189; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Biology: Mice lack the muscle for exercise (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature08991
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 31 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 1 April, but at a later date. ***
A detailed description of the adiponectin signalling pathway, revealed in this week’s Nature, could aid the development of a new class of exercise-mimicking drugs.
Adiponectin is a fat-derived protein known to have anti-diabetic properties. Here, Toshimasa Yamauchi and colleagues show that mice lacking a particular adiponectin receptor (AdipoR1) in muscle cells are insulin resistant and less able to endure exercise.
Adiponectin causes an influx of calcium into muscle cells through this receptor, which is essential for various downstream signalling steps implicated in mitochondrial function and oxidative stress. The same pathway is activated by exercise, so strategies designed to target AdipoR1 may prove useful exercise mimetics, the authors suggest.
CONTACT
Toshimasa Yamauchi (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Tel: +81 3580 09166; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] & [7] Physics: Putting the squeeze on quantum measurement (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature08919
DOI: 10.1038/nature08988
***These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 31 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 1 April, but at a later date. ***
The measurement technique underlying state-of-the-art atomic clocks receives a boost in precision this week, thanks to two advances in the quantum manipulation of ultracold atoms. The demonstration, in two different contexts, of ‘spin-squeezing’ in a Bose–Einstein condensate opens the way to practical applications of measurements that are more precise than classical statistics would allow.
Atom interferometers, which rely on the wave properties of particles, are used in a variety of ultra-high-precision measurements, from determining the gravitational constant to defining the time standard. In traditional interferometers, the precision is limited by classical statistics, arising from the finite number of atoms used in the experiment. Now Markus Oberthaler and colleagues show that, by using a specially prepared Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) as the input to an interferometer, they can beat the classical precision limit.
Oberthaler et al. took advantage of the special properties of the BEC to prepare ‘entangled’ quantum states in their interferometer. This permitted the ‘squeezing’ of the uncertainty distribution of the particles’ spins, allowing more precise measurements to be made. In an independent study, Max Riedel and colleagues demonstrate the creation of similarly ‘spin-squeezed’ states in a BEC confined to an ‘atom chip’. Although Riedel et al. did not perform an interferometric measurement, their demonstration of multi-particle entanglement on a chip paves the way for portable atomic clocks that should also surpass the classical precision limit.
CONTACT
Markus Oberthaler (University of Heidelberg, Germany) Author paper [6]
Tel: +49 6221 54 5170; E-mail: [email protected]
Max Riedel (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany) Author paper [7]
Tel: +49 89 2180 3703; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] Physics: A new twist on electron beams (pp 737-739)
The electronic analogue of ‘twisted light’ — an electron beam that carries orbital angular momentum — is reported this week in Nature. Just as twisted light has led to applications such as the ‘optical spanner’, which can rotate particles trapped in an optical beam, twisted electron beams should find use in a variety of microscopy and spectroscopy techniques.
The wave properties of electrons have led to applications, such as electron microscopy, in which electron beams are used in an analogous fashion to light. Light beams can carry angular momentum in the form of photon spin (polarized light), but also in a less familiar form, known as orbital angular momentum (twisted light). In this case, the wavefronts, instead of being parallel planes, form a spiral, with a ‘phase singularity’ along its axis.
Twisted light can be created by passing a light beam through a ‘spiral phase plate’, which introduces a phase singularity. To manufacture an analogous phase plate for an electron beam would require machining a spiral step less than 100 nanometres high — a considerable challenge. Masaya Uchida and Akira Tonomura got around this problem by finding a spontaneously formed spiral-like structure in thin-film graphite, obtained by crushing a pencil lead. As predicted, an electron beam passing through this natural phase plate acquired a twist. Better spiral phase plates, perhaps machined using ion beams, should allow twisted electron beams to find their way into applications.
CONTACT
Masaya Uchida (RIKEN, Saitama, Japan)
Tel: +81 527 35 5162; E-mail: [email protected]
[9] Neuroscience: Which comes first, the caspases or the tau? (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature08890
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 31 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 1 April, but at a later date. ***
The activation of caspases — enzymes that are usually involved in mediating cell death — precedes the formation of tangles — aggregates of tau protein within neurons — by hours to days in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) a paper in this weeks Nature reports.
Neurofibrillary tangles are commonly observed in AD and the tau-related fronto-temporal-dementia (FTD). Post-mortem studies of brain tissue have found that the location of tangles match closely with regions of massive neuronal death, leading to the idea that tangles cause the neurodegeneration in AD and FTD.
However, using in vivo imaging through mice brains, Bradley Hyman and colleagues find in fact the opposite: caspase activation occurs first, and precedes tangle formation. The neurons, in which tangles form, remain alive and caspase activity subsides. They propose a new model in which caspase-cleaved tau initiates tangle formation, which allows the neuron to escape cell death. “Soluble tau species, rather than fibrillar tau, may be the critical toxic moiety underlying neurodegeneration”, the authors suggest.
CONTACT
Bradley Hyman (Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 726 2299; E-mail: [email protected]
[10] And finally… Unlikely movie stars yield secrets of gene function (pp 721-727; N&V)
Movies of billions of genetically altered human cells have helped to reveal hundreds of genes that control one of the most fundamental processes of life — cell division. The study is reported in this week’s Nature.
Jan Ellenberg and colleagues used RNA interference to systematically silence each of the 21,000 or so human protein-coding genes in a fluorescently labelled human cell line, then used high-throughput time-lapse microscopy to film the result. An astounding 190,000 time-lapse movies were recorded, providing time-resolved records of cell divisions, which were analysed quantitatively by computer. Hundreds of human genes involved in diverse biological functions including cell division, migration and survival were identified. The entire data set, including every single movie, is now publicly available at http://www.mitocheck.org.
CONTACT
Jan Ellenberg (The European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany)
Tel: +49 6221 387328; E-mail: [email protected]
Jason Swedlow (University of Dundee, UK) N&V Author
Tel: +44 1382 385819; E-mail: [email protected]
Stephen Elledge (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA) N&V Author
Tel: +1 617 525 4510; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[11] Genome-wide association study of CNVs in 16,000 cases of eight common diseases and 3,000 shared controls (pp 713-720)
[12] Identification of Younger Dryas outburst flood path from Lake Agassiz to the Arctic Ocean (pp 740-743)
[13] NINJA connects the co-repressor TOPLESS to jasmonate signalling (pp 788-791)
[14] Curvature in metabolic scaling (pp 753-756; N&V)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 31 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 1 April, but at a later date. ***
[15] The kinetics of two-dimensional TCR and pMHC interactions determine T-cell responsiveness
DOI: 10.1038/nature08944
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: 11
AUSTRIA
Vienna: 10
BELGIUM
Antwerp: 13
Ghent: 13
Mol: 13
CANADA
Sidney: 12
Toronto: 2, 11
Vancouver: 11
CHINA
Shanghai: 7
DENMARK
Copenhagen: 3
FRANCE
Nantes: 11
Paris: 6, 7, 9, 11
GERMANY
Berlin: 1
Dresden: 10
Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen: 10
Garching: 7
Heidelberg: 6, 10
Mannheim: 10
Munich: 7
ISRAEL
Rehovot: 1
JAPAN
Kumamoto: 5
Saitama: 8
Tokyo: 5
Tsukuba: 5
SPAIN
Madrid: 13
Oviedo: 1
SWEDEN
Uppsala: 1, 11
SWITZERLAND
Basel: 7
Schlieren: 10
Zurich: 10
UNITED KINGDOM
Aberdeen: 11
Bath: 11
Birmingham: 11
Brighton: 12
Bristol: 11
Cambridge: 1, 10, 11
Canterbury: 1
Cardiff: 11
Compton: 1
Dundee: 2, 11
Edinburgh: 1, 11
Exeter: 11
Glasgow: 11
Leeds: 11
Leicester: 11
London: 11
Manchester: 11
Newcastle upon Tyne: 11
Oxford: 1, 11
Sheffield: 1, 11, 12
Southampton: 11
Sutton: 11
Torbay: 11
York: 2
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
La Jolla: 13
Los Angeles: 1, 14
Stanford: 3
Colorado
Aurora: 1
Illinois
Champaign: 1
Louisiana
Baton Rouge: 1
New Orleans: 1
Massachusetts
Boston: 11, 14
Cambridge: 1
Charlestown: 9
Missouri
St Louis: 1
Montana
Great Falls: 9
New York
New York: 4
North Carolina
Durham: 1
Oregon
Portland: 1
Texas
Houston: 1
Washington
Seattle: 1
PRESS CONTACTS…
From North America and Canada
Neda Afsarmanesh, Nature New York
Tel: +1 212 726 9231; 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
Rebecca Walton, Nature, London
Tel: +44 20 7843 4502; E-mail: [email protected]
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