WWW.NATURE.COM/NATURE
VOL.469 NO.7330 DATED 20 JANUARY 2011
This press release contains:
· Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Cancer: Interfering with interferon
Comment: Prenatal genetic testing is here at last
Social evolution: Small farmers
Astronomy: Black holes and correlations
Quantum physics: Solid-state spins entangled by the billions
Cancer: A second major genetic player in kidney cancer
Physics: Electromagnetic hotspots — the inside story
Biology: ‘Reducing’ microbial activity
Materials science: A new strategy for colloidal self-assembly
Social evolution: Too risky to succeed?
And finally… To sleep, perchance to dream
· Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
· Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Cancer: Interfering with interferon (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature09666
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 19 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 20 January, but at a later date. ***
Drugs that block the activity of interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) could prove useful in the treatment of skin cancer, indicates a Nature paper that highlights a role for the signalling molecule in melanoma formation.
Exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation is linked to melanoma formation, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. Glenn Merlino and colleagues show—in a mouse model—that UVB triggers the recruitment of white blood cells called macrophages, which produce IFN-gamma and promote the development of melanoma. Blocking IFN-gamma (a type-II interferon) with an antibody inhibits abnormal skin cell growth, but treatment with an antibody against type-I interferons has no such effect.
Type-I interferons are classically thought to be anti-tumorigenic, and one such molecule, IFN-alpha, is used clinically to treat melanoma. So the idea that IFN-gamma is pro-tumorigenic represents a potential paradigm shift, and the study hints that IFN-gamma and its downstream targets could prove viable targets for the prevention and treatment of melanoma.
CONTACT
Glenn Merlino (National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD, USA)
Tel: +1 301 496 4270; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Social evolution: Small farmers (pp 393-396; N&V)
A primitive form of agriculture has been observed in a species of amoeba. The finding, reported in this week’s Nature, shows that the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum can carry, seed and prudently harvest its food, although no active cultivation is seen.
Agriculture has been key to the ecological success of humans, and some species of social insect, such as fungus-growing ants and termites, have advanced agriculture. Recent work has suggested that microorganisms show surprisingly sophisticated behaviours, including communication, cooperation and many kinds of symbiosis.
Debra Brock and colleagues studied Dictyostelium discoideum, a species of soil-dwelling social amoeba that feeds on bacteria, and found that about one-third of the organisms studied (called farmers) exhibited a form of husbandry. Farmers refrain from consuming all of the available bacteria at a site; instead, they stop feeding early and incorporate the bacteria into their spore-containing fruiting bodies to seed a new bacteria crop at a different location.
This is the first example of a farming symbiosis between a social amoeba and the bacteria it eats. The authors suggest that the connection with sociality may not be coincidental because social species have suitably structured populations.
CONTACT
Debra Brock (Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)
Tel: +1 713 348 3053; E-mail: [email protected]
Jacobus Boomsma (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) N&V author
Tel: +45 35 32 13 40; E-mail: [email protected]
Comment: Prenatal genetic testing is here at last (pp 289-291)
Regulators, doctors and patients need to be braced for the ethical, legal and practical effects of being able to sequence fetal genomes from mothers’ blood, says Henry T. Greely in a Comment piece in this week’s Nature.
Last week, researchers showed that a blood test for mothers could detect Down’s syndrome, and last month, writes Greely, two research groups independently published proof that the fetal genotype for thousands of genes could be derived from samples of fetal DNA with just a 10-millilitre blood draw from a pregnant woman. Checking for hundreds or thousands of traits with one blood test, early in pregnancy, could move prenatal genetic testing from rare to routine within the next decade. “That possibility will challenge all societies to decide for which ends and by what means they want such tests to be used, raising hard questions about, among other things, abortion, disability rights, eugenics, and informed consent,” he notes.
Greely calls on professional organizations, in medicine and in genetics, to get involved, in training their members about these technologies and in considering guidelines for their use, especially with regard to informed consent. Regulators, companies and consumer advocates need to be talking about assuring safety, efficacy and quality. “In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration should start that process immediately. And it is time for ethics commissions, such as the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, to report on these issues,” he writes. “Whether we view NIPD gladly as a way to reduce human suffering, warily as a step towards a eugenic dystopia, or as a mix of both, we should agree that the better we prepare, the more likely we are to avoid the worst misuses of this potentially transformative technology.”
CONTACT
Henry T. Greely (Stanford Law School, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 650 723 2517; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] & [4] Astronomy: Black holes and correlations (pp 374-380; N&V)
Black holes coevolve only with the bulges of their host galaxies and do not correlate with disk mass, pseudobulge mass or dark matter haloes, suggest two papers in this week’s Nature. The findings may help to explain the mechanisms involved with black hole ‘feeding’ and growth.
Supermassive black holes are thought to lie in the centre of most large galaxies, and their masses are known to correlate with the bulge components (central, tightly packed spheres of old stars) of their host galaxies. The authors of two Nature papers use new observations of velocity dispersions in galaxies to investigate whether black hole mass also correlates with the mass of disk-shaped groups of stars, ‘pseudobulges’ (bulges that resemble disk galaxies rather than elliptical galaxies) and dark matter.
In the first paper, John Kormendy and colleagues combine pseudobulge classifications in a selection of nearby galaxies with velocity dispersion measurements to show that black holes don’t correlate at all with disks and correlate very little or not at all with pseudobulges. The authors also suggest two distinct methods of black hole feeding, depending on whether the black hole is in a bulge or whether it is hosted by a galaxy with pseudobulges or no bulges.
Kormendy and Bender show, in a second paper, that there is almost no correlation between black holes and dark matter haloes unless the host galaxy also contains a bulge.
CONTACT
John Kormendy (University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA)
Tel: +1 512 471 8191; E-mail: [email protected]
P. James Peebles (Princeton University, NJ, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 609 258 4385; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Quantum physics: Solid-state spins entangled by the billions (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature09696
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 19 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 20 January, but at a later date. ***
Ten billion pairs of electron and nuclear spins have been entangled simultaneously, in a crystal of phosphorus-doped silicon. This achievement of ‘ensemble entanglement’ in the solid state, reported online this week in Nature, fulfils one of the essential requirements for a silicon-based quantum information processor.
The production of non-classical, inseparable (‘entangled’) states is a requirement for most quantum technologies, including long-distance communication and information processing. Large quantum computers are likely to encode quantum bits in large collections (‘ensembles’) of spins, but until now there has been no demonstration of entanglement in spin ensembles in the liquid or solid state.
John Morton and colleagues now report the generation of entanglement between the electron and nuclear spins of ten billion phosphorus-31 atoms hosted in an isotopically pure single crystal of silicon. The authors describe how the electron–nuclear spin entanglement that they have generated could be used to create a scalable network of entangled nuclear spins — forming the basis for a silicon quantum computer.
CONTACT
John Morton (University of Oxford, UK)
Tel: +44 1865 273592; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Cancer: A second major genetic player in kidney cancer (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature09639
***This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 19 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 20 January, but at a later date. ***
Patients with the most common form of kidney cancer frequently carry mutations in the PBRM1 gene, reveals a Nature paper, which places PBRM1 as the second major cancer gene in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC).
The gene, a member of the SWI/SNF complex involved in transcriptional regulation, is mutated in around 40% of cases and Andrew Futreal and colleagues also show that it acts as a tumour suppressor gene in various culture models.
Mutations in another tumour suppressor gene, VHL, are often found in patients with ccRCC, so this study changes the view that VHL is the only gene that is predominantly mutated in ccRCC. The team also demonstrate a putative role for PBRM1 in pancreatic cancer, highlighting possible therapeutic potential for this gene and its related signalling pathways.
CONTACT
Andrew Futreal (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK)
Tel: +44 1223 494857; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Physics: Electromagnetic hotspots — the inside story (pp 385-388; N&V)
Single molecules of a fluorescent dye have been used to probe the local electromagnetic field inside nanometre-scale ‘hotspots’ on metal surfaces. This new imaging technique, reported in this week’s Nature, has a measurement accuracy as small as 1.2 nanometres — allowing the shape of the locally enhanced field to be delineated.
When a rough metallic surface is illuminated, hotspots of concentrated light can appear, where the electromagnetic field at the surface is particularly intense. This ‘surface enhancement’ effect has been known for more than 30 years, and can be used to detect weak chemical signals — as, for example, in surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. But the mechanism generating the enhancement has been debated, in part because of the difficulty of measuring the electromagnetic field on length scales smaller than a few hundred nanometres.
Xiang Zhang and colleagues take advantage of the fact that single fluorescent molecules can be localized with single-nanometre accuracy, and use dye molecules as probes (‘reporters’) of the local field in single hotspots. Adjusting the dye concentration so that, on average, only one molecule arrives at a hotspot at a time, the authors use the fluorescence of each reporter molecule as a measure of the strength of the local electromagnetic field. The authors obtain two-dimensional fluorescence enhancement profiles of single hotspots as small as 15 nanometres, from which they conclude that the field strength decays exponentially from the hotspot peak.
CONTACT
Xiang Zhang (University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 510 643 4978; E-mail: [email protected]
Martin Moskovits (University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 805 893 5024; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] Biology: ‘Reducing’ microbial activity (pp 419-423; N&V)
The antimicrobial activity of human beta-defensin 1 (hBD-1) is regulated by its redox state, suggests a Nature paper published this week.
In its reduced state, the protein shows potent antimicrobial activity, Jan Wehkamp and colleagues demonstrate. This ‘reduced’ environment is similar to conditions found in the distal colon, so the authors speculate that reduced hBD-1 helps shield healthy colonic epithelium from colonization by commensal bacteria and opportunistic fungi.
CONTACT
Jan Wehkamp (University of Tübingen, Germany)
Tel: +49 711 8101 5700; E-mail: [email protected]
Robert Lehrer (University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 310 825 5340; E-mail: [email protected]
[9] Materials science: A new strategy for colloidal self-assembly (pp 381-384)
A simple way to build large, complex networks from identical microscopic particles is reported in Nature this week. Steve Granick and colleagues show how small spheres, decorated with a simple surface pattern of hydrophobic domains, can be induced to form an intricate, open crystalline lattice that is quite distinct from the close-packed arrangements commonly found in colloidal crystals.
Colloidal crystals — formed from micrometre- or nanometre-sized particles — are useful for a variety of technologies, and also as model systems for the fundamental study of crystallization. Suggestions for achieving the programmable assembly of complex crystals have focused on designing building blocks with specific surface functionalities, such as DNA linkers or attractive patches, but these approaches have been difficult to implement.
Granick and colleagues opted for a more general approach, in which the desired network architecture is encoded, not in localized attractive spots, but in larger attractive regions, the size of which serves to constrain the number of nearest-neighbour contacts for each particle. The authors illustrate this strategy by demonstrating the self-assembly of micrometre-sized spheres, decorated with hydrophobic regions at their poles, into an open, basket-like network called a ‘kagome lattice’. The structure is of possible technological interest because it contains both hydrophobic and hydrophilic pores, and the new strategy should lend itself to the fabrication of other complex, open structures.
CONTACT
Steve Granick (University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA)
Tel: +1 217 333 5720; E-mail: [email protected]
Social evolution: Too risky to succeed?
Models of biological networks could offer useful insights for understanding financial systems, suggest Andrew Haldane and Robert May in a Perspective in Nature. The authors argue that public policy decision-makers need to concentrate on increasing the stability of the whole financial system rather than focusing on individual banks.
Following the recent financial crisis, economists and policy makers have increasingly recognized the urgent need to address risk across the whole financial system. Haldane and May explore the relationship between system complexity and stability by using simplified models, analogous with ecological and epidemiological models, to explain how the failure of a single bank can have cascading effects across the system.
The authors offer suggestions for how stability across the whole banking system can be achieved, while allowing individual banks to prosper; increasing diversity and modularity, for example, is important. Setting requirements on banks’ liquid assets and netting and clearing complex financial derivatives—the financial instruments often blamed for the financial crisis—could also help. “It took a generation for ecological models to adapt,” the authors conclude. “The same is likely to be true of banking and finance.”
In an accompanying News & Views Forum, contrasting opinions on the Perspective are offered by Neil Johnson and Thomas Lux. Their views differ as to the relevance of the paper, and provide Nature readers with informed debate and context about the article.
CONTACT
Robert May (University of Oxford, UK)
Tel: +44 1865 271276; E-mail: [email protected]
Andrew Haldane (Bank of England, London, UK)
Tel: +44 207 601 3881; E-mail: [email protected]
Neil Johnson (University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA) N&V author
E-mail: [email protected]
Please contact via:
Marie Guma-Diaz (Media Relations Officer, University of Miami)
Tel: +1 305 284 1601; E-mail: [email protected]
Thomas Lux (University of Kiel, Germany) N&V author
Tel: +49 431 880 3661; E-mail: [email protected]
[10] And finally… To sleep, perchance to dream (pp 428-431)
General anaesthetics are used to keep patients unconscious during surgeries all over the world, but the molecular mechanism of action of these molecules is poorly understood. In this week’s Nature, Pierre-Jean Corringer and colleagues report the X-ray crystal structures of two common anaesthetics, propofol and desflurane, bound to a bacterial homologue of a pentameric ligand-gated ion channel (pLGIC).
The structures reveal that the two anaesthetics bind in the same site — in the upper part of the transmembrane domain of the channel — although desflurane binds deeper inside the ligand-binding cavity. It may be possible to use these structures to design new allosteric modulators that inhibit or activate pLGICs by binding to this site.
CONTACT
Pierre-Jean Corringer (Pasteur Institute, Paris, France)
Tel: +33 1406 13102; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[11] Evolution of human BCR–ABL1 lymphoblastic leukaemia-initiating cells (pp 362-367)
[12] Nascent transcript sequencing visualizes transcription at nucleotide resolution (pp 368-373)
[13] Atomic-level modelling of the HIV capsid (pp 424-427)
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.
CANADA
Barnaby: 5
Toronto: 11
FRANCE
Le-Kremlin-Bicêtre: 6
Paris: 10
Villejuif: 6
GERMANY
Berlin: 5
Braunschweig: 5
Cologne: 6
Garching: 8
Jena: 5
Munich: 3, 4
Stuttgart: 8
Tübingen: 8
JAPAN
Hiyoshi: 5
NETHERLANDS
Amsterdam: 6
SINGAPORE
Singapore: 6
SWITZERLAND
Fällanden: 8
UNITED KINGDOM
Cambridge: 6
Hinxton: 6
Oxford: 5
Sutton: 6
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Berkeley: 7
La Jolla: 13
San Francisco: 10, 12
District of Columbia
Washington: 1
Illinois
Urbana: 9
Maryland
Bethesda: 1
Frederick: 1
Michigan
Grand Rapids: 6
Minneapolis
Minnesota: 6
New York
New York: 1
Tennessee
Memphis: 11
Texas
Austin: 3, 4
Houston: 2
Virginia
Charlottesville: 13
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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