Ecology: Leading the way to successful fisheries

Summaries of newsworthy papers - Special: International Year of Chemistry 2011; Materials science: Polycrystalline graphene — the big (and small) picture; Chemistry: Large molecules from small templates; World View: Legal highs – the dark side of medicinal chemistry

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VOL.469 NO.7328 DATED 06 JANUARY 2011

This press release contains:

• Summaries of newsworthy papers:

Ecology: Leading the way to successful fisheries

Special: International Year of Chemistry 2011

Materials science: Polycrystalline graphene — the big (and small) picture

Geochemistry: Oxygen-deficient ancient oceans

Chemistry: Large molecules from small templates

Chemistry: Understanding the shapes of sugars

World View: Legal highs – the dark side of medicinal chemistry

And finally… How catfish get along

• Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo

• Geographical listing of authors

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[1] Ecology: Leading the way to successful fisheries (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature09689

This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 05 January at 1800 London time / 1300 US Eastern Time 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 06 January, but at a later date.

An analysis of co-managed fisheries reveals that strong community leadership is the most important factor for success. The finding, reported in Nature, indicates that more resources should be spent on identifying community leaders and building social capital.

Fish are a critical natural resource but although global catches have peaked, demand for seafood continues to rise. When fishers and managers share responsibility for regulation of a fishery (‘co-management’), promising results for sustainability have been observed, but until now there has been no comprehensive analysis of the reasons for this.

Nicolás Gutiérrez and colleagues analysed 130 fisheries in 44 countries. They identify 19 factors thought to be important for the success or failure of fishery co-management, including the country’s level of development and the ecosystem type. A fishery needs at least eight attributes for co-management to succeed; additional attributes boost the success further. The most important factor was the presence of at least one community leader, respected by their peers and willing to act for the good of the community. Building social capital and establishing community-monitored protected areas were also important.

The authors caution that in order to better understand how to improve co-management of fisheries, long-term ecological and socioeconomic data from a range of fisheries will need to be gathered.

CONTACT

Nicolás Gutiérrez (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA)

Tel: +1 206 221 5457; E-mail: [email protected]

Special: International Year of Chemistry 2011 (pp 14-28)

Chemistry needs an overhaul if it is to solve big problems and advance fundamental understanding, according to a Comment article in this week’s Nature. As part of Nature’s special issue on chemistry, George M. Whitesides and John Deutch argue that the discipline is poorly equipped for today’s problems and will wither before the challenges of the future if it does not change.

The authors suggest that chemistry should focus on the practical — food, energy, water — to rediscover its purpose, and revamp its structure and teaching accordingly. Chemists, they argue, can “still be curious, en route to addressing the big societal challenges of our times”.

Also in the chemistry special issue, Phil Ball finds out why new techniques mean that it’s crunch time for the convenient fiction that holds the discipline together — the bond. “We have a far from exhaustive understanding of the ways in which quantum rules will permit atoms to unite — and that in consequence, the synthetic inventiveness of chemists suffers from a limited view of the possibilities,” he says. The article is illustrated with original cartoons by Roz Chast, familiar to many for her work in The New Yorker.

* The special issue also includes News Features by Katharine Sanderson (about green chemistry) and Richard van Noorden (on applications of graphene and carbon nanotubes), as well as vox pops from ten leading chemists, outlining what lies ahead for the field.

CONTACT

George M. Whitesides (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) Comment author (overhauling chemistry)

E-mail: [email protected]

John Deutch (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA) Comment author (overhauling chemistry)

E-mail: [email protected]

Philip Ball (Science writer, London, UK) Comment author (chemical bonds)

E-mail: [email protected]

For background information on the other content in the special issue, please contact the press office.

[2] Materials science: Polycrystalline graphene — the big (and small) picture (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature09718

This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 05 January 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 06 January, but at a later date.

Single-atom-thick graphene sheets grown by chemical vapour deposition are ‘patchwork quilts’ of small grains with different lattice orientations. This conclusion, and evidence of the nature of the grain boundaries and their effects on graphene’s mechanical and electrical properties, comes from electron-microscope images and related measurements reported online this week in Nature.

Single-layer graphene sheets can now be produced on metre scales, making this material attractive for large-area electronic applications. Such large sheets can be expected to be polycrystalline, and the grain boundaries are predicted to have distinct properties that depend on their atomic arrangement. Yet little is known about the graphene grain structure, partly because of the 100,000-fold difference in size between the grains and the atoms that comprise grain boundaries.

David Müller and colleagues span these disparate length scales with two different types of transmission electron microscopy. Using atomic-scale imaging, they determine the location and identity of every atom at a grain boundary, finding that it comprises mostly pairs of carbon pentagons and heptagons, instead of the regular hexagons of bulk graphene. On the much larger scale, the authors use a technique called diffraction-filtered imaging to rapidly map the location,
orientation and shape of hundreds of grains and their boundaries. Correlating these images with nanomechanical and electrical measurements, the authors find that the grain boundaries severely
decrease the mechanical strength of graphene membranes, but, surprisingly, have no significant effect on their electrical properties.

CONTACT

David Müller (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA)

Tel: +1 607 255 4065; E-mail: [email protected]

[3] Geochemistry: Oxygen-deficient ancient oceans (pp 80-83; N&V)

Evidence that the later Cambrian ocean was deficient in oxygen is reported in Nature this week. The work may help to provide more clues about the evolutionary events that occurred during that period.

It has been suggested that there was widespread anoxia in subsurface water masses of later Cambrian oceans; the evidence to support this, however, has proved elusive. Benjamin Gill and colleagues analyse sulphur isotope records from six globally distributed sections of later Cambrian marine rocks which are around 499 million years old. A box model study of sulphur and carbon isotope data from that time period supports the idea that there were large-scale anoxic and sulphidic conditions in the later Cambrian oceans.

The authors suggest that the environmental challenges presented by widespread anoxia may have been a prevalent, if not dominant, influence on animal evolution in Cambrian oceans.

CONTACT

Benjamin Gill (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA)

Tel: +1 617 495 7602; E-mail: [email protected]

Graham Shields-Zhou (University College London, UK) N&V author

Tel: +44 20 7679 7821; E-mail: [email protected]

[4] Chemistry: Large molecules from small templates (pp 72-75; N&V)

A powerful new strategy for synthesizing large macromolecules using simple templates is presented in this week’s Nature. Harry Anderson and colleagues use the technique, called ‘Vernier templating’, to synthesize a ring-shaped molecule with a diameter of ~5 nanometres, made from 12 covalently bound porphyrin molecules.

Templates are widely used in chemical synthesis to arrange molecular building blocks so that they can be covalently linked into complex molecules that cannot be easily synthesized by classical methods. As chemists attempt to synthesize larger molecules, they require larger templates — which can themselves be difficult to synthesize.

Anderson and colleagues solve this problem in an elegant fashion, by taking advantage of the principle used in a Vernier measuring device. As applied to chemical complexes between molecular templates and building blocks, this principle allows the synthesis of complexes that are significantly larger than the template molecules. The final ingredient in the authors’ strategy was the realization that Vernier complexes do not need to be linear — allowing the synthesis of a twelve-membered ring from four-membered building blocks, assembled on templates with only six binding sites.

This porphyrin ring is one of the largest molecules ever synthesized so efficiently and as a pure compound. The authors suggest that the Vernier templating strategy should provide access to even larger cyclic molecules, and should be applicable to a range of cyclization reactions.

CONTACT

Harry Anderson (University of Oxford, UK)

Tel: +44 1865 275704; E-mail: [email protected]

Christopher Hunter (University of Sheffield, UK) N&V author

Tel: +44 114 222 9476; E-mail: [email protected]

[5] Chemistry: Understanding the shapes of sugars (pp 76-79)

A chemical phenomenon called the ‘anomeric effect’, which influences the shapes of many biological molecules, is investigated in a new way in this week’s Nature. Benjamin Davis and colleagues use laser spectroscopy and a specially designed small molecule to probe the conformations of a simple sugar molecule in the gas phase, shedding light on the preference for one conformation over another.

First observed in 1955, the anomeric effect acts to stabilize one form of ring-shaped sugar molecules relative to another. Despite the prevalence of this effect in many chemical and biological
systems, its physical origins are still unclear, owing in part to the difficulty of studying the effect in an environment free of extraneous factors, such as solvent.

Davis and colleagues have met this challenge by using a small peptide molecule as a sensor for sugar molecules in the gas phase. They used laser desorption to vaporize the peptide and sugar molecules, and then interrogated the resulting peptide–sugar complexes using laser spectroscopy. By comparing the spectra of two different conformations (‘anomers’) of the same sugar molecule, the authors were able to discern the relative contributions of different electronic interactions to the
anomeric effect. The results suggest a physical basis for the chemical substitutions observed in biologically important sugars.

CONTACT

Benjamin Davis (University of Oxford, UK)

Tel: +44 1865 275652; E-mail: [email protected]

World View: Legal highs – the dark side of medicinal chemistry (p. 7)

A chemist who makes new drugs in the search for medicines says he is haunted by the thought that they are being sold without safety testing as ‘legal highs’. David Nichols says his research has already led indirectly to several deaths, with unknown amateur chemists copying his scientific discoveries and selling the results. In a World View article in this week’s Nature, Nichols says: “It did not help that I knew some of these fatalities were associated with the use of multiple drugs, or had involved very large doses. I had published information that ultimately led to human death.” Speculating on the possibility that the practice could lead to mass deaths, he adds: “This question, which was never part of my research focus, now haunts me.”

The article highlights a dark side of modern chemistry: as Nichols points out, it has become increasingly clear that results he publishes in academic journals are monitored by underground chemists, who search for new compounds with similar effects to illegal drugs such as ecstasy.
Because they are new, such molecules are not banned and so are technically legal. But they have not been tested for side effects or chronic toxicity.

CONTACT

David Nichols (Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA)

E-mail: [email protected]

[6] And finally… How catfish get along (pp 84-88; N&V)

Müllerian mimics — species with common predators that mimic each other’s warning signals — can coexist because they occupy subtly different environmental niches, a study of catfish in this week’s Nature suggests.

Many different species of catfish (Corydoradinae) swim in the streams, rivers and floodplains of South America, with as many as three almost identically coloured species coexisting together in large mixed shoals. But although providing safety in numbers, it is not clear if the strategy favours one mimic at the expense of the others. Martin Taylor and colleagues show that most of these species do not compete for resources, and so are able to live side by side.

CONTACT

Martin Taylor (Bangor University, UK)

Tel: +44 7790 589317; E-mail: [email protected]

James Mallet (University College London, UK) N&V author

Tel: +44 20 7679 7412; E-mail: [email protected]

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…

[7] Fungal lipochitooligosaccharide symbiotic signals in arbuscular mycorrhiza (pp 58-63)

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.

BRAZIL
Botucatu: 6

FRANCE
Castanet-Tolosan: 7
Grenoble: 7
Orsay: 5
Toulouse: 7

SPAIN
Bilbao: 5

UNITED KINGDOM
Bangor: 6
Didcot: 4
East Kilbridge: 6
Nottingham: 4
Oxford: 4, 5

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

California
Riverside: 3

Indiana
Bloomington: 3

Massachusetts
Cambridge: 3

New Jersey
Glassboro: 5

New York
Ithaca: 2

Ohio
Columbus: 3

Oregon
Corvallis: 2

Pennsylvania
College Park: 4

Utah
Provo: 2

Washington
Seattle: 1

URUGUAY
Montevideo: 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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Published: 05 Jan 2011

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