This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Astrophysics: Supermassive black hole formation in the early Universe
Opinion: Disasters widen the rich–poor divide
Planetary science: Origin of asteroid pairs
Genetics: A new ALS susceptibility gene
Opinion: Save the census
Evolutionary biology: The evolution of eusocial behaviour
Cancer: New mechanism for p53 silencing
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Astrophysics: Supermassive black hole formation in the early Universe (pp 1082-1084; N&V)
A new model for the formation of supermassive black holes, with masses more than a billion times that of the Sun, is presented in this week’s Nature. Lucio Mayer and colleagues report numerical simulations showing that mergers between massive protogalaxies, in the first billion years of the Universe, provide an environment in which supermassive black holes can form on timescales of about a hundred million years.
Massive black holes are thought to lie at the centres of most large galaxies. Observations of distant quasars (active galaxies, powered by accretion onto a central black hole) show that billion-solar-mass black holes were already in existence less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Existing models for the formation of these black holes are not entirely satisfactory; in particular, a model invoking the collapse of gas in isolated protogalaxies seems to require rather special conditions to prevent consumption of the gas by star formation before a black hole can form.
Mayer and colleagues add a new wrinkle to this idea, noting that mergers between massive protogalaxies are thought to have been common in the early Universe. Their simulated merger of two massive disk galaxies produces an unstable, rotating disk of gas, which funnels more than a hundred million solar masses of gas to a small central gas cloud in only a hundred thousand years. This cloud collapses to a black hole, which can then grow to a billion solar masses in about a hundred million years by accreting gas from the surrounding disk.
Author contact
Lucio Mayer (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel: +41 1 6356197
E-mail: [email protected]
Marta Volonteri (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 734 647 4212
E-mail: [email protected]
Opinion: Disasters widen the rich–poor divide (p 1042)
On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on 29 August, New Orleans might be congratulated for its recovery. But that recovery is patchy, says John Mutter in an Opinion piece in Nature this week. A disproportionate number of poorer people lost their homes and jobs, and recovery in the poorest areas has been slowest. The disaster has served to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
The same happens on a national level: disasters can devastate poorer countries as happened to Samoa after its hurricanes, or Haiti after its earthquake earlier this year. In the face of a growing population of poor people, the environmental stresses of climate change and a likely increase in future natural disasters — such as the terrible floods hitting Pakistan — the rich–poor divide is set to increase even more. Of all the consequences of our warming world, this could be the most unjust, Mutter argues. He says the outcome of Hurricane Katrina needs to be heeded, in order to prevent future problems.
Author contact
John Mutter (Columbia University, New York, NY, USA)
Please contact via:
Kevin Krajick (Senior Science Writer, Columbia University)
Tel: +1 212 854 9729
E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Planetary science: Origin of asteroid pairs (pp 1085-1088)
The phenomenon of asteroid pairs — pairs of asteroids that share similar orbits around the Sun, but are not bound together — finds an explanation in new observations published this week in Nature. Petr Pravec and colleagues conclude that asteroid pairs form by ‘rotational fission’ of a parent asteroid into a binary system, the components of which separate from each other shortly after the fission event.
Although discovered only recently, asteroid pairs are ubiquitous. Pair members have low relative velocities, and most seem to have separated less than a million years ago. Their size range is similar to that of gravitationally bound binary asteroids, so it may be that binary systems and pairs are formed by related processes. Previous studies have suggested that binaries may form from parent bodies spinning sufficiently quickly to break apart — a process known as rotational fission. But until now there has been no evidence to indicate whether the same mechanism is involved in pair formation.
Pravec and colleagues used photometric observations of a sample of asteroid pairs to test some critical predictions of the rotational fission model. The mass ratios and spin rates inferred from these observations conform to the model predictions, and are also a good match to the characteristics of binary systems. The authors note that binary systems formed by fission are expected to have chaotic dynamics, which provides a means of escaping from one another for pair members with sufficient energy.
Author contact
Petr Pravec (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Ondrejov, Czech Republic)
Tel: +420 323 620352
E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Genetics: A new ALS susceptibility gene (pp 1069-1075; N&V)
Mutations in the ataxin-2 gene may contribute to the devastating neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a Nature paper suggests.
The ataxin-2 protein contains a polyglutamine tract, a portion of the protein where the amino acid glutamine is repeated many times. Aaron Gitler and colleagues analysed DNA from 915 individuals with ALS and found that, in some individuals, a mutation in the ataxin-2 gene caused the polyglutamine stretch to become extended. Intermediate-length expansions (27–33 glutamines) were significantly associated with ALS, and accounted for as much as 4.7% of the ALS cases. This makes this particular mutation the most common genetic risk factor for ALS identified to date.
The protein TDP-43 has previously been implicated in ALS, and here the team show that ataxin-2 interacts with TDP-43, modifyingTDP-43 toxicity in animal and cellular models. Strategies that target this interaction may prove a useful point for therapeutic intervention.
Author contact
Aaron Gitler (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA)
Tel: +1 215 573 8251
E-mail: [email protected]
Don Cleveland (University of California, San Diego, CA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 858 534 7811
E-mail: [email protected]
Opinion: Save the census (p 1043)
Census-taking around the world is under assault thanks to concerns about privacy, skyrocketing costs and plummeting response rates, write Stephen Fienberg and Kenneth Prewitt in an Opinion piece in this week’s Nature. Canada made a decision to scrap its mandatory questionnaire this year, replacing it with a voluntary survey. And the United Kingdom is aiming to replace its census with a system based on administrative records by 2021. Many European nations moved from censuses to registries in the 1990s — and some have come to regret it. Government statistics are no less vital to a nation's scientific infrastructure than is an observatory or particle accelerator, the authors argue. Detailed, reliable demographic data is used in everything from determining how many hospitals are needed, to tracking the health of the poor. Although administrative records such as post-office address lists, driver’s licence records and health registers might seem an attractive, cheap and easy alternative to census data, they are often incomplete, inaccurate or out of date.
Fienberg and Prewitt say that census offices should not be ignoring these records. They should work to incorporate them, along with other digital data sources such as bank-card use and GPS signals from mobile phones. But they must also work hard to ensure that this data is of good quality, protects personal privacy and represents the entire population. This is a formidable challenge. Scientists and census bureaus need to appreciate the scale of the task ahead, and the requirement to tackle it.
Author contact
Stephen Fienberg (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
Tel: +1 412 268 2723
E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Evolutionary biology: The evolution of eusocial behaviour (pp 1057-1062)
Natural selection alone can be used to explain the evolution of eusocial behaviour without the need for kin selection theory, argue Martin Nowak and colleagues in this week’s Nature.
Eusocial organisms, such as ants, wasps and bees, form hierarchical social systems comprising reproductive queens and sterile workers. Kin selection theory, based on its concept of inclusive fitness, has been the major theoretical attempt to explain the evolution of such behaviour. But after four decades ruling the roost, it is time to recognise the theory’s prowess and its pitfalls.
Inclusive fitness — the fitness individuals derive from increasing the survival of their relatives’ offspring — is a suitable alternative approach to standard natural selection’s direct fitness — the fitness derived from passing genes on directly — for a well-defined subset of situations. But it is not applicable in general, the team argue. Standard natural selection theory in the context of precise models of population structure represents a simpler and superior approach. It allows the evaluation of multiple competing hypotheses, and provides an exact framework for interpreting empirical observations.
Author contact
Martin Nowak (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 4964737
E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Cancer: New mechanism for p53 silencing (pp 1076-1081; N&V)
A newly discovered mechanism that switches off the tumour suppressor protein p53 could aid the development of novel cancer therapies. The findings are reported in this week’s Nature.
p53, the so-called ‘guardian of the genome’, is inactivated in almost all cancers. Clodagh O’Shea and colleagues show that a small adenoviral protein, E4-ORF3, can inactivate p53 via a silencing mechanism that prevents p53 from accessing target DNA sites.
The mechanism represents a paradigm shift becaudse the process occurs independently of the adenovirus E1B-55k, which was thought to be critical for p53 inactivation in adenovirus-infected cells. Mutant viruses lacking E1B-55k have been tested as viral cancer therapies for p53-positive tumours and this study may help explain why they seem to lack true p53 selectivity and aid the development of true p53-selective anti-cancer viral therapies.
Author contact
Clodagh O’Shea (Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 858 453 4100 ext.1632
E-mail: [email protected]
Kevin Ryan (Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, Glasgow, UK) N&V author
Tel: +44 141 3303655
E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[6] Upper-ocean-to-atmosphere radiocarbon offsets imply fast deglacial carbon dioxide release (pp 1093-1097)
[7] Lithospheric layering in the North American craton (pp 1063-1068)
[8] Coherent measurements of high-order electronic correlations in quantum wells (1089-1092; N&V)
[9] IkBb acts to inhibit and activate gene expression during the inflammatory response (pp 1115-1119)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 25 August 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 26 August, but at a later date. ***
[10] Phosphorylation of the CPC by Cdk1 promotes chromosome bi-orientation
DOI: 10.1038/nature09390
[11] The structure of (CENP-A–H4)2 reveals physical features that mark centromeres
DOI: 10.1038/nature09323
[12] Structure of RCC1 chromatin factor bound to the nucleosome core particle
DOI: 10.1038/nature09321
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.
CHILE
Antofagasta: 2
Santiago: 1
CZECH REPUBLIC
Ondrejov: 2
Prague: 2
FRANCE
Paris: 2
Pic du Midi: 2
GERMANY
Frankfurt: 3
INDIA
Mumbai: 12
ISRAEL
Tel Aviv: 2
JAPAN
Tokyo: 10
NEW ZEALAND
Auckland: 6
SLOVAKIA
Bratislava: 2
SPAIN
Bellaterra: 6
La Palma: 2
SWITZERLAND
Zurich: 1
UKRAINE
Kharkiv: 2
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Berkeley: 2, 7
Davis: 6
La Canada: 2
La Jolla: 5, 9
Livermore: 6
Los Angeles: 9
Menlo Park: 1
Mountain View: 2
Pasadena: 9
Santa Cruz: 6
Colorado
Boulder: 2
Connecticut
New Haven: 9
Massachusetts
Boston: 9
Brookfield: 2
Cambridge: 4, 8
Woods Hole: 6
New Jersey
New Brunswick: 6
New York
New York: 9
North Carolina
Boone: 2
Chapel Hill: 2
Ohio
Columbus: 1
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 3, 11, 12
University Park: 12
Texas
Houston: 9
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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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