This press release contains:
- Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Cancer: Defining new subtypes of ovarian cancer
Astronomy: Discovery of a distant luminous quasar
Immunology: The Vpx factor for HIV-1 replication
AfricaSpecial: Population pressures
AfricaSpecial: The battle against wheat rust
Physics: Squeezing light from a single atom
Microbiology: Genomic islands enable bacteria/virus coexistence
Physics: Current and future directions for superconducting circuits
Physics: Tunnelling thermal spin currents
- Mention of papers to be published at the same time with the same embargo
- Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Cancer: Defining new subtypes of ovarian cancer (pp 609-615)
A large-scale genomic analysis of high-grade serous ovarian adenocarcinomas reveals a mutational spectrum that is surprisingly simple and distinct from other ovarian cancer subtypes. The study, reported in Nature this week, identifies aberrant genes and networks that have the potential to be targeted with therapies selected to be effective against these specific aberrations.
Ovarian cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death among women. As part of the Cancer Genome Atlas project, Paul Spellman and colleagues analysed genomic and epigenomic aberrations in nearly 500 high-grade serous ovarian adenocarcinomas. Mutations in a gene called TP53 dominate these tumours (detected in 96% of samples); mutations in nine other genes including NF1, BRCA1, BRCA2,RB1 and CDK12, although less prevalent, also have an important role in high-grade serous ovarian adenocarcinoma. Furthermore, homologous recombination is defective in about half of these tumours.
The analyses help to establish new tumour subtypes and set the stage for approaches to subtype-specific treatment of high-grade serous ovarian adenocarcinomas.
CONTACT
Paul Spellman (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 510 486 5123; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Astronomy: Discovery of a distant luminous quasar (pp 616-619; N&V)
The discovery of the first bright quasar in the infrared is presented in Nature this week. This quasar, seen as it was around 12.9 billion years ago, could provide a vital probe for understanding the state of the early Universe.
Observations of quasars can reveal the ionization state of the intergalactic medium during the first billion years after the Big Bang. Quasars have historically been identified in optical surveys, which are
insensitive to sources at redshifts beyond 6.5. Daniel Mortlock and colleagues report the discovery of a quasar at redshift 7.085, just 0.77 billion years after the Big Bang, 0.1 billion years beyond the previous recorded quasar at redshift 6.44. Continuing observations will explore the gap between the two quasars, a cosmological epoch about which little is currently known.
CONTACT
Daniel Mortlock (Imperial College London, UK)
Tel: +44 7891 122 798; E-mail: [email protected]
Chris Willott (National Research Council, Victoria, Canada) N&V author
Tel: +1 250 363 8103; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Immunology: The Vpx factor for HIV-1 replication (658-661; N&V)
A protein that prevents efficient HIV-1 replication in macrophages has been identified in this week’s Nature.
Macrophages have a key role in HIV infection by facilitating virus spread and providing virus reservoirs that are resistant to antiviral therapies. HIV-1 has a reduced ability to replicate in macrophages owing to an unknown restrictive mechanism, whereas HIV-2 and related simian immunodeficiency viruses can counteract this mechanism. Jacek Skowronski and colleagues show that a protein called SAMHD1 blocks HIV infection in macrophages. This restriction factor, which has been linked to disposal
of endogenous nucleic acids in the disease Aicardi–Goutières syndrome, can be overcome by a protein called Vpx — expressed by some lentiviruses including HIV-2 — that degrades SAMHD1, thus enabling viral infection.
The findings uncover an intricate relationship between innate immune mechanisms that control response to self and to retroviral pathogens.
CONTACT
Jacek Skowronski (Case School of Medicine, Cleveland, OH, USA)
Tel: +1 216 368 8930; E-mail: [email protected]
Michael Emerman (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research, Seattle, WA, USA) N&V
author
Tel: +1 206 667 5058; E-mail: [email protected]
Africa Special: Population pressures (pp 567-573)
Fast-growing countries interested in boosting their economies can find no better investment than in family planning, argue Josh Ruxin and Antoinette Habinshuti in a Comment article in this week’s Nature. But international organizations and agencies aren’t paying attention, probably because they are afraid of stoking religious or political flames. As part of this issue’s special focus on Africa, the authors outline how Rwanda, the most densely populated mainland nation in sub-Saharan Africa, can offer lessons for other countries.
Like much of the continent, Rwanda is growing economically, but if it doesn’t limit the growth of its population, the nation will remain in poverty. To combat a traditional resistance to family planning, the
government is improving access to contraception, backing education initiatives for girls and women and engaging the public on the subject. Sadly, Rwanda’s neighbours do not share its vision. Governments tend to focus on the more fashionable issues of environmental destruction and the Millennium Development Goals, but with the world’s population projected to rise to seven billion later this year and to nine billion by 2050, governments who chose the path taken by Rwanda are likely to see healthier, wealthier and smaller populations.
Also in the Special, Neil Turok writes about the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Africa, and his plans to expand it across the continent. And Bassirou Bonfoh and his colleagues describe their experiences of living and working in the Côte d’Ivoire during a decade of conflict and discuss how strong local and international partnerships can help in achieving and maintaining an international standard of research.
CONTACT
Josh Ruxin (Columbia University, New York, NY, USA)
Tel: +250 788 301 020; E-mail: [email protected]
Neil Turok (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada)
Tel: +1 519 569 7600; E-mail: [email protected]
Africa Special: The battle against wheat rust (pp 555-565)
Fungal diseases such as stem rust and yellow rust are a scourge on crops, but developing new varieties of wheat that are resistant to them is only half the battle, according to a News Feature in this week’s Nature special issue on Africa. Gayathri Vaidyanathan toured wheat-growing regions of Kenya and Ethiopia, and found researchers struggling to adapt to the needs of local communities and win over sceptical farmers who are not keen to switch to new varieties.
Wheat crops around the world are key sources of nutrition for 4.5 billion people. Agricultural researchers have developed varieties of wheat that are resistant to stem rust and yellow rust, but there is a large gap between the world of agricultural research and the farming communities of developing nations. The situation in Ethiopia, which was hard hit by yellow rust last year, illustrates this gap, and the feature discusses initiatives being taken to close it.
A separate News Feature examines the myriad challenges facing Africa as it seeks to build its capacity for scientific research and development. Reporters in the continent profile the research environment in Senegal, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania. And a third article focuses on China’s investment in African science — examining the pros and cons for Africa and whether progress will continue when the foreign funding ends.
For more information on these Features, please contact the Nature press office.
[4] Physics: Squeezing light from a single atom (pp 623-626; N&V)
The observation of squeezed light from a single atom is reported in Nature this week. This finding may offer new possibilities for photonic quantum logic with single emitters.
Single quantum emitters are of fundamental interest because they emit light with unusual, non-classical properties. One such effect, termed squeezing, can be used to reduce the level of noise fluctuations of the light field, which is potentially useful for ultraprecise measurements. Squeezed beams from a few tens of atoms have been generated previously, but squeezed light from a single atom has not been observed until now.
Alexi Ourjoumtsev and colleagues generate squeezed light with a single atom in a high-finesse optical resonator. The squeezed light stems from the quantum coherence of two photons emitted from the system. Such coherent control of propagating photons by single quantum emitters could
be of value in quantum information processing.
CONTACT
Alexi Ourjoumtsev (Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Garching, Germany)
Tel: +33 1 64 53 33 82; E-mail: [email protected]
Luis Orozco (University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 301 405 9740; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Microbiology: Genomic islands enable bacteria/virus coexistence
(pp 604-608; N&V)
Coexistence of marine bacteria and viruses is facilitated by mutations in genomic islands that affect viral adhesion, a study in this week’s Nature suggests. Diversity in these loci reduces the effective size of the host population for infection by a given virus, and provides a genomic mechanism that facilitates long-term coexistence of viruses and their hosts in nature.
Analysis of 77 substrains of Prochlorococcus cyanobacteria with resistance to a selection of viruses reveals common features of resistance-conferring mutations, Debbie Lindell and colleagues report. The majority of these mutations are located in large regions of non-conserved genes, known as genomic islands, that are present throughout this population of cyanobacteria. Most mutations alter the structure of the cell surface, affecting the way that viruses attach to the cell surface. Prevention of viral attachment and entry into the cell is the best line of defence.
This resistance, however, comes at a cost: resistant bacteria have reduced growth rates and are more susceptible to infection by other viruses.
CONTACT
Debbie Lindell (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel)
Tel: +972 4829 5831; E-mail: [email protected]
Frédéric Partensky (CNRS & Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Roscoff, France) N&V author
Tel: +33 2 98 29 25 64; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Physics: Current and future directions for superconducting circuits (pp 589-597)
Superconducting circuits provide a versatile experimental platform for
testing and exploring the fields of physics that would normally need
complex atomic systems. A Review article in this week’s Nature looks
at progress made in this rapidly advancing field, and anticipates the
fundamental and practical directions that future work will take.
Superconducting circuits can be engineered to exhibit quantum phenomena
that are normally associated with atomic systems and thus can behave as
‘artificial atoms’. Such systems have implications for various fields of
physics, including quantum computing. Indeed, recent technological
advances have made it possible to perform atomic physics and quantum
optics experiments on a chip using these artificial atoms.
In their Review, Jian Qiang You and Franco Nori describe what
superconducting circuits can do beyond systems with natural atoms, and
consider possible applications to future quantum technologies. For
example, superconducting circuits could lead to advances in the
performance of quantum measurements. Furthermore, they could enable the
study of complex controllable quantum dynamics, leading to quantum
simulations and on-chip studies of interdisciplinary physics.
CONTACT
Franco Nori (RIKEN, Wako-shi, Japan)
Tel: +81 48 467 9681; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Physics: Tunnelling thermal spin currents (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature10224
This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 29 June 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 30 June, but at a later date.
Scientists demonstrate the functional use of heat in electronic devices and circuits by generating a spin voltage across a silicon device in a thermal gradient. Tunnelling of electron spins through an oxide barrier from a ferromagnet to silicon, using heat only, is reported in Nature this week. Exploiting heat to drive thermal transfer of spin provides new options for the design of spintronic devices with different characteristics.
The conversion of temperature differences directly into electricity is known as the Seebeck effect. A spin equivalent of this effect can create a spin current where spin-up electrons accumulate on one side and spin-down electrons on the other. Ron Jansen and colleagues observe electron spins tunnelling through an oxide barrier mediated by a thermal gradient over a ferromagnet oxide silicon device. This Seebeck spin-tunnelling is a mechanism for spin injection into a non-magnetic semiconductor that could be used to develop a new family of spin-tunnelling materials with which to improve the efficiency of electronic devices.
CONTACT
Ron Jansen (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan)
E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[8] Morphological evolution caused by many subtle-effect substitutions in regulatory DNA (pp 598-603)
[9] Quantum quench of Kondo correlations in optical absorption (pp 627-630)
[10] Modern optics in exceptionally preserved early Cambrian arthropod eyes from Australia (631-634)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 29 June 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 30 June, but at a later date.
[11] A role for glia in the progression of Rett syndrome
DOI: 10.1038/nature10214
[12] Direct conversion of mouse fibroblasts to hepatocyte-like cells by defined factors
DOI: 10.1038/nature10263
[13] Structure of a PIB-type ATPase homologous to the Wilson and Menkes proteins
DOI: 10.1038/nature10191
[14] Amygdala to nucleus accumbens excitatory transmission facilitates reward seeking
DOI: 10.1038/nature10194
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
Adelaide: 10
Armidale: 10
Mawson Lakes: 10
Melbourne: 1
Parkville:
AUSTRIA
Vienna: 9
BELGIUM
Antwerp: 2
CANADA
Vancouver: 1
CHINA
Beijing: 13
Shanghai: 6
DENMARK
Aarhus: 13
Glostrup: 13
FRANCE
Palaiseau: 4
GERMANY
Garching: 2, 4
Göttingen: 11
Homburg: 11
Leipzig: 11
München: 9
ISRAEL
Haifa: 5
Rehovot: 5
JAPAN
Kawaguchi: 12
Fukuoka: 12
Tsukuba: 7
Wako-shi: 6
NORWAY
Oslo: 13
POLAND
Warsaw: 3
SPAIN
Madrid: 10
SWITZERLAND
Zürich: 9
THE NETHERLANDS
Enschede: 4
Groningen: 7
Leiden: 2
Utrecht: 7
UNITED KINGDOM
Birkenhead: 2
Cambridge: 2
Durham: 2
Edinburgh: 2
London: 1, 10
Nottingham: 2
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Alabama
Huntsville: 1
Arizona
Phoenix: 1
California
Berkeley: 1, 5
Irvine: 1
Los Angeles: 1
Novato: 1
Palo Alto: 1
San Francisco: 1, 13, 14
Santa Cruz: 1
Stanford: 1, 14
Connecticut
New Haven: 9
Delaware
Newark: 1
Hawaii
Hilo: 2
Kansas
Kansas City: 3
Massachusetts
Arlington: 1
Boston: 1
Cambridge: 1
Maryland
Baltimore: 1, 14
Bethesda: 1
Chevy Chase: 11
Michigan
Ann Arbor: 1, 6
Minnesota
Rochester: 1
Missouri
Kansas City: 3
St Louis: 1
North Carolina
Chapel Hill: 1, 14
Durham: 1
New Jersey
Princeton: 1, 8, 9
New York
Buffalo: 1
Cold Spring Harbor: 3
New York: 1, 3
Stony Brook: 11
Ohio
Cleveland: 3
Columbus: 11
Oregon
Beaverton: 11
Portland: 11
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 1
Pittsburgh: 1
Rhode Island
Providence: 1
Tennessee
Memphis: 1
Texas
Houston: 1
Virginia
Fairfax: 1
Wisconsin
Milwaukee: 1
PRESS CONTACTS…
For North America and Canada
Neda Afsarmanesh (Nature, New York)
Tel: +1 212 726 9231; E-mail: [email protected]
For Japan, Korea, China, Singapore and Taiwan
Mika Nakano (Nature, Tokyo)
Tel: +81 3 3267 8751; E-mail: [email protected]
For the UK
Rebecca Walton (Nature, London)
Tel: +44 20 7843 4502; E-mail: [email protected]
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