This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Neuroscience: MicroRNA protects against cocaine addiction?
Opinion: Goodall on securing chimpanzees’ future
Opinion: Why we should worry about future oil spills
Astronomy: Anatomy of a powerful microquasar
Climate: Gathering dust
Neuroscience: ‘Parkinsonian pathways’ functionally verified
Microscopy: Localizing single molecules with near-atomic resolution
Quantum physics: A bright future for entangled photons
Molecular biology: The same but different
And finally… The proton just got smaller
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Neuroscience: MicroRNA protects against cocaine addiction? (pp 197-202; N&V)
Researchers have identified a tiny snippet of non-coding, regulatory RNA that they think plays a critical role in compulsive cocaine use. Therapeutic strategies designed to target such microRNAs may have anti-addictive properties, reports a new study in this week’s Nature.
Rats that have self-administered cocaine for long time periods have increased levels of the microRNA miR-212 in the part of the brain called the striatum, Paul Kenny and colleagues show. Blocking striatal miR-212 signalling triggers an increase in cocaine consumption, whereas boosting striatal levels causes a decrease in cocaine intake — all in rats with extended, but not restricted, access to the drug, suggesting that in addicted rats, miR-212 may act as a natural brake to prevent further escalation of cocaine seeking.
The authors suggest that miR-212 acts as a protective factor against addiction and that impaired miR-212 signalling may increase vulnerability to cocaine addiction. They also demonstrate that the miR-212 probably acts via CREB, a known regulator of the rewarding effects of cocaine.
Author contact:
Paul Kenny (The Scripps Research Institute, Jupiter, FL, USA)
Tel: +1 561 228 2231
E-mail: [email protected]
Marina Picciotto (Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA)
N&V author
Tel: +1 203 737 2041
E-mail: [email protected]
Opinion: Goodall on securing chimpanzees’ future (pp 180-181)
Jane Goodall writes in Nature’s Opinion section this week, marking 50 years since she first set foot in what is now Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park on 14 July 1960. Reflecting on five decades as a primatology pioneer and conservation luminary, Goodall calls for urgent action to save chimpanzees from extinction in the wild, as the animals come under increasing threat from habitat loss, hunting for bushmeat and diseases. Their survival “requires a dramatic change to how we think about the natural world as well as advances in science and technology,” she writes, with co-author Lilian Pintea.
Today in Gombe, chimpanzee research, community-centred conservation and geospatial technologies have combined to demonstrate that humans and chimpanzees can live together without conflict, say Goodall and Pintea. Using geographical information systems and satellite imagery, researchers have created an overall view of how chimpanzees and people use the land, integrating information from a variety of sources, such as indigenous knowledge about habitat, ground-based observations of chimpanzee behaviour and remote information on vegetation cover and forest structure.
Meeting the needs both of humans and the great apes means dealing with difficult issues of land use and tenure, and finding alternatives to practices that are destructive to forests — but there is no time to waste in the battle to save chimpanzees, Goodall concludes. “Above all, we need to give people, particularly those who live alongside our closest relatives, good reasons to preserve them.”
Author contact:
Jane Goodall and Lilian Pintea
Please contact via:
Claire Jones (Director of External Relations, The Jane Goodall Institute, Arlington, VA, USA)
Tel: +1 703 682 9220
E-mail: [email protected]
Opinion: Why we should worry about future oil spills (pp 182-183)
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has received unprecedented attention as an ecological disaster — but worse may lie ahead, says Arne Jernelov of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, Sweden, in an Opinion piece in this week’s Nature. The potential for future spills is huge, particularly as nations with strong ties between their government and oil industry expand drilling activities into deeper and more difficult wells, such as in the Russian Arctic and off the coast of Brazil.
Technologies for mitigating spills are not improving fast enough, he adds. Jernelov led a United Nations Environment Programme investigation of the previous largest deepwater blowout, which hit the Mexican Ixtoc 1 rig in 1979. The techniques to try to stop the oil flow are still basically the same, and information gleaned from that incident doesn’t seem to have been at the fingertips of responding bodies this time around, he says.
The average size of spills from tankers is on the decline, but pipeline bursts are on the rise, and well blowouts, which have the potential to release huge amounts of oil, are sporadic. This makes it hard to share knowledge about blowouts and to ensure that research programmes into their impacts remain active. Steps can and must be taken to limit future risk and damage, Jernelov argues. More oil profits should be diverted into clean-up research; more information about spills must be made freely available; and watchdogs need to work harder to ensure that proper regulations are put in place and upheld.
Author contact:
Arne Jernelov (Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, Sweden)
E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Astronomy: Anatomy of a powerful microquasar (pp 209-212)
A large nebula in the nearby Sculptor galaxy has now been identified as a bubble of shock-ionized gas surrounding a ‘microquasar’ — a stellar-mass black hole, accreting material from a companion star. The detailed structure of the system, revealed by a multi-wavelength study published this week in Nature, provides new insight into the energetics of black holes and their jets.
Ultraluminous X-ray sources, the brightest black holes outside the nuclei of active galaxies, are known to be associated with shock-ionized nebulae. Microquasars are much less luminous, but Manfred Pakull and colleagues surmised that they also might power ionized nebulae if much of their energy is channelled into outflowing jets.
Pakull and colleagues now report the discovery of just such a system, in the Sculptor galaxy. By combining observations at X-ray, optical and radio wavelengths, the authors construct a detailed picture of the system, including the interaction of two powerful jets with the interstellar medium. The jets are 10,000 times more energetic than the X-ray emission from the system’s core, confirming that most of the gravitational energy derived from accretion is converted into kinetic energy rather than radiation.
Author contact:
Manfred Pakull (University of Strasbourg, France)
Tel: +33 3 68 85 24 30
E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Climate science: Gathering dust (pp 226-228)
Human-induced dust emissions in the Sahel region of Africa have made an important contribution to the overall atmospheric dust load for about two centuries, reports a paper in this week’s Nature.
The Sahara Desert is the largest source of mineral dust in the world. But it was uncertain how much dust had been generated by human activities. Stefan Mulitza and colleagues now constructed a 3,200-year record of dust deposition off northwest Africa. Their findings suggest that dust deposition was related to precipitation until the early nineteenth century, when there was a sharp increase in dust deposition—this is around the same time that commercial agriculture arrived in the Sahel region.
Author contact:
Stefan Mulitza (University of Bremen, Germany)
Tel: +49 421 218 65536
E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Neuroscience: ‘Parkinsonian pathways’ functionally verified (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature09159
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 07 July 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 08 July, but at a later date. ***
Parkinsonian-like movement problems can be induced or eased by ‘switching on’ one of two distinct neural pathways, a mouse study in this week’s Nature suggests. The paper boosts our understanding of the neural circuits governing motor behaviour and pinpoints a cellular network that could be targeted therapeutically to help ease certain movement disorders.
Anatol Kreitzer and colleagues used light-sensitive genetic switches to control the activity of two populations of cells found in the basal ganglia, a collection of interconnected brain areas considered to be critical for movement. Activating cells thought to belong to the so-called ‘indirect’ pathway triggered Parkinsonian-like motor symptoms, while activating the ‘direct’ pathway dramatically improved motor symptoms in a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease.
It has long been thought that motor control is achieved through the balanced activity of these two parallel, opposing, anatomically distinct pathways, but the model has never been empirically tested — until now. This study confirms a causal role for the two pathways in motor behaviour.
Author contact:
Anatol Kreitzer (Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, San Francisco, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 415 734 2507
E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Microscopy: Localizing single molecules with near-atomic resolution (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature09163
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 07 July 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 08 July, but at a later date. ***
The ability to measure distances between or within molecules has improved by an order of magnitude, thanks to a new microscopy method published online in Nature this week. The technique’s resolution, at less than a nanometre, will be important for revealing the detailed workings of biological molecules, and may also find application in other fields that rely on precision imaging.
Much progress in optical microscopy centres on overcoming the ‘diffraction limit’ — the limit to spatial resolution of about 200 nanometres, imposed by the finite wavelength of light. One route to sub-diffraction measurements involves measuring the distance between fluorescent probe molecules, which can be attached to molecules of interest. Recently, such measurements have been made with accuracies of 5 to 20 nanometres, but it has not been clear whether, or how, further improvements could be made.
Now Steven Chu and colleagues have traced the main problem to tiny spatial distortions in the photoelectric detectors used for microscopy. Using a feedback system to keep the sample image precisely fixed on the same region of the detector, they were able to eliminate this source of error, and achieve a resolution of half a nanometre in their distance measurements. This should be sufficient to allow the characterization of the components of large, multi-protein biological complexes. The method should also inspire similar improvements in nanotechnology or astronomical measurements that also rely on digital cameras.
Author contact:
Steven Chu (US Department of Energy, Washington, DC, USA)
Tel: +1 202 586 2662
E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Quantum physics: A bright future for entangled photons (pp 217-220)
A new, ultrabright source of ‘entangled’ photon pairs is reported in Nature this week. The technique used should ultimately deliver entangled pairs with an efficiency of 80% — an improvement of more than an order of magnitude over existing sources. This would benefit both laboratory experiments and real-world applications of quantum information processing.
Pairs of quantum-mechanically entangled photons are essential components for quantum information science. Existing sources provide entangled pairs at a very low rate — below 0.01 photon pairs per excitation pulse — which substantially limits their applications. Sources based on the conversion of laser light in a nonlinear crystal produce pairs with intrinsically low probability. By contrast, pairs of electron–hole pairs (biexcitons) trapped in a semiconductor quantum dot can emit entangled photon pairs with probability near one; but in bulk material only a very small fraction of the photon pairs can be collected, as they are emitted randomly in all directions.
Pascale Senellart and colleagues have now overcome the collection problem, by coupling the emission from a single quantum dot to a specially designed optical cavity. They report a combined creation and collection efficiency of 12% — already brighter than any existing source, and sufficient for measurements that typically take several hours to be made in less than a minute. With improvements in fabrication of the device, the authors suggest that the overall efficiency should reach 80%, further improving the prospects for realistic
applications.
Author contact:
Pascale Senellart (Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nanostructures, Marcoussis, France)
Tel: +33 1 69 63 61 96
E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Molecular biology: The same but different (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature09184
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 07 July 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 08 July, but at a later date. ***
In the worm C. elegans, the FOXO transcription factor DAF-16 plays a major role in a signalling pathway called the insulin/IGF-1 signalling pathway or IIS. Through its involvement in this pathway, DAF-16 regulates various biological processes, including the worms’ longevity and response to stress.
In this week’s Nature, Heidi Tissenbaum and colleagues describe a new DAF-16 isoform called DAF-16d/f. In a series of experiments involving manipulations of gene expression in the worms, Tissenbaum and her team show that the isoforms have both cooperative and specific functions.
Unlike in mammals, where four different FOXO genes perform overlapping and distinct functions, C. elegans appears to use multiple isoforms from a single gene to fine-tune IIS-mediated processes.
Author contact:
Heidi Tissenbaum (University of Massachusetts, Worcester, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 508 854 5840
E-mail: [email protected]
[8] And finally… The proton just got smaller (pp 213-216; N&V)
An experiment that has been on physicists’ wish-lists for many decades has delivered an unexpected result: the proton seems to be about 4% smaller than has been thought. As reported in this week’s Nature, the result calls into question either the value of the most accurately known fundamental constant or the validity of a remarkably successful physical theory.
The theory of quantum electrodynamics, which describes how light and matter interact, has provided many successful and highly precise predictions of atomic properties. The precision of both the theory and atomic spectroscopy have advanced to the point where accurate knowledge of the size of the proton (specifically, its ‘charge radius’) is the limiting factor for comparing experiment with theory. The currently accepted value for the proton radius, based mostly on spectroscopy of the hydrogen atom, is known to an accuracy of only 1%.
Randolf Pohl and colleagues have improved this accuracy by a factor of ten, by performing a technically challenging experiment that has only recently become feasible. Replacing the electron in hydrogen by its heavier counterpart, the muon, increases the effect of the proton radius on the measured atomic spectrum. The resulting, more accurate, value for the radius differs from the previously accepted value by an amount that cannot be explained. As the authors discuss, the result seems to require either a change in the previously well accepted value of the Rydberg constant (which plays an important role in the hydrogen spectrum), or a problem with quantum electrodynamics itself. More information about the project is available at: https://muhy.web.psi.ch/wiki/.
Author contact:
Randolf Pohl (Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Garching, Germany)
Tel: +49 89 32905 281
E-mail: [email protected]
Aldo Antognini (Paul-Scherrer-Institut, Villigen, Switzerland)
– Co-author
Tel: +41 79 355 03 29
E-mail: [email protected]
Franz Kottmann (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) – Co-author
Tel: +41 56 310 35 02
E-mail: [email protected]
Paul Indelicato (Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Paris, France) –
Co-author
Tel: +33 6 60 67 63 83
E-mail: [email protected]
Jeff Flowers (National Physical Laboratory) N&V author
Tel: +44 20 8614 0417
E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[9] Measuring mechanical tension across vinculin reveals regulation of focal adhesion dynamics (pp 263-266; N&V)
[10] Structural mechanism of C-type inactivation in K+ channels (pp 203-208)
[11] Structural basis for the coupling between activation and inactivation gates in K+ channels (pp 272-275)
[12] A random cell motility gradient downstream of FGF controls elongation of an amniote embryo (pp 248-252)
[13] Conserved role of intragenic DNA methylation in regulating alternative promoters (pp 253-257)
[14] Mechanism and regulation of acetylated histone binding by the tandem PHD finger of DPF3b (pp 258-262)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 07 July 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 08 July, but at a later date. ***
[15] LRRC26 auxiliary protein allows BK channel activation at resting voltage without calcium
DOI: 10.1038/nature09162
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: 8
CANADA
Vancouver: 13
Verdun: 13
FRANCE
Illkirch: 12
Marcoussis: 6
Paris: 8
Strasbourg: 2
GERMANY
Bremen: 3
Bremerhaven: 3
Garching: 8
Stuttgart: 8
INDIA
Hyderabad: 10, 11
NETHERLANDS
Den Burg: 3
POLAND
Warsaw: 6
PORTUGAL
Aveiro: 8
Coimbra: 8
SWITZERLAND
Fribourg: 8
Lausanne: 13
Villigen: 8
Zurich: 8
TAIWAN
Hsinchu: 8
UNITED KINGDOM
Holmbury St Mary: 2
London: 9
Oxford: 12
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Berkeley: 5
San Francisco:4, 13
Santa Cruz: 13
Stanford: 4, 5
Connecticut
New Haven: 8
District of Columbia
Washington: 5
Florida
Jupiter: 1
Palm Beach Gardens: 1
Illinois
Chicago: 10, 11
Urbana: 9
Kansas
Kansas City: 12
Maryland
Bethesda: 13
Massachusetts
Worcester: 7
Missouri
Kansas City: 12
St Louis: 13
New Jersey
Princeton: 8
New York
New York: 12, 14
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 9
Texas
Austin: 15
Lubbock: 10, 11
Virginia
Charlottesville: 9
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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