This press release contains:
Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Biology: Low-energy approach to fibrillation
Comment: Medical genomics must cover more ethnic groups
Materials science: Electronic ink
Outlook: Alzheimer's disease – prevention rather than cure
Cancer: Selective slaughter
Genomics: Genome sequences predict human population history
Climate change: A downside to the terrestrial carbon sink
Organic chemistry: Natural product family reunion
Quantum physics: The gentlest measurement
And finally... Breathe easy
Mention of papers to be published at the same time
Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Biology: Low-energy approach to fibrillation (pp 235-239; N&V)
Low-energy electrical pulses can be used to control electrical turbulence in the heart, a Nature paper suggests. It is hoped that the method could yield a less-damaging alternative to standard cardiac defibrillation, which uses a single high-energy electric shock to restore normal cardiac rhythm.
The new technique, tested on dogs, delivers five sequential low-energy electrical field pulses to the fibrillating heart — an average energy reduction of 84% compared to standard defibrillation.
Cardiac muscle is not uniform. And Stefan Luther, Flavio Fenton and colleagues think their method works by stimulating natural heterogeneities, such as blood vessels and fatty tissue, to redistribute the current around the heart, restoring normal sinus rhythm.
CONTACT
Stefan Luther (Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany)
Tel: +49 551 5176 370; E-mail: [email protected]
Flavio Fenton (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA)
Tel: +1 516 672 6003; E-mail: [email protected]
Birgit Krummheuer (Press Officer, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization)
Tel: +49 551 5176 668 or tel: +49 173 3958 625; E-mail: [email protected]
Richard Gray (Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, MD, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 301 796 2486; E-mail: [email protected]
Comment: Medical genomics must cover more ethnic groups (pp 163-165)
More than 1,000 genome-wide association studies have now been carried out to investigate the genetic basis of complex chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes. But 96% of these studies include only people of European descent. In a Comment in this week’s Nature, Carlos Bustamante and his colleagues call for geneticists worldwide to “investigate a much broader ensemble of populations”.
If this doesn’t happen, the authors argue, “a biased picture will emerge of which variants are important, and genomic medicine will largely benefit a privileged few”.
Evidence is accumulating that findings made in one population may not necessarily carry over to others. For instance, in people with native South American ancestry, a variant of a protein that transports cholesterol into cells is strongly associated with low levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, obesity and type 2 diabetes. This variant is absent from European, Asian and African populations.
Bustamante and his colleagues spell out how population-based studies on a global scale could be ramped up, both by “giving incentives to researchers in developed countries to increase the representation of minority populations in their studies”, and by “empowering investigators in the developing world to undertake genomics research themselves.”
CONTACT
Carlos Bustamante (Stanford University School of Medicine, CA, USA)
Tel: +1 650 723 6330; E-mail: [email protected]
[2] Materials science: Electronic ink (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature10313
*** This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 13 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 14 July, but at a later date. ***
High-performance, single-crystal, thin-film transistors can be produced using an inkjet-based printing technique, reports a paper published online in Nature this week.
Producing electronic devices via printing technologies using semiconducting ’ink‘ (known as ‘printed electronics’) holds great promise for the manufacture of cheap, flexible and large-area electronics. However, conventional printing processes tend to result in poor crystallinity of the printed material, which limits its electrical properties.
Hiromi Minemawari and colleagues describe an inkjet-printing process that involves combining two solutions — a semiconductor in its solvent and a liquid in which the semiconductor is insoluble — on top of a substrate, leading to the controlled formation of patterned semiconducting thin films that have exceptionally high and uniform crystallinity.
CONTACT
Hiromi Minemawari (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan)
Tel: +81 29 861 3028; E-mail: [email protected]
Outlook: Alzheimer's disease – prevention rather than cure (p S15)
Attempts to reduce the aggregates of amyloid-beta protein in the brains of patients with dementia have failed, but a Perspective in a Nature Outlook on Alzheimer’s disease this week argues that clinicians should test treatments in people before the onset of symptoms. Sam Gandy contends that to properly assess the merits of any aggregation-preventing treatment, we need to test agents on those most at risk of developing the disease, in some cases up to 20 years before the build-up of amyloid-beta plaque takes its toll on cognition.
The need to understand this puzzling disease is urgent: the number of cases of Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly rising as the global population ages, and incidence is projected to reach 115 million by 2050. As the amyloid hypothesis comes under greater scrutiny in the wake of these drug failures, scientists are looking for inspiration in other neurodegenerative conditions. The infectious-like qualities of prions in scrapie (which afflicts sheep) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) shed light on how Alzheimer’s disease initiates and propagates. In fact, when Alzheimer’s disease first came to prominence in the early 1980s, it was originally suspected to be a prion disease, and the field has now come full circle.
CONTACT
Sam Gandy (Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, New York, NY, USA)
Please contact via:
Ian Michaels (Press secretary, Mount Sinai School of Medicine)
Tel: +1 212 241 9200; E-mail: [email protected]
Or contact via:
Tim Armour (President, Cure Alzheimer’s Fund)
Tel: +1 781 622 2201; E-mail: [email protected]
[3] Cancer: Selective slaughter (pp 231-234)
A chemical screen identifying a compound that induces the selective killing of cancer cells in mice is reported in this week’s Nature. The work could lead to therapies that target cancer cells but leave normal cells unaffected.
Stuart Schreiber and colleagues identify piperlongumine as a small molecule that increases the number of chemically reactive molecules containing oxygen and also the level of programmed cell death in both cancer cells and normal cells that have been transformed with a combination of oncogenes. They note that piperlongumine significantly induced cell death in cancer cells irrespective of p53 status and with little effect on normal cells.
Although this work reports a novel strategy for eradicating cancer cells by targeting the ROS stress-response pathway, further work will be needed to identify determinants of piperlongumine sensitivity in a wider range of cancers.
CONTACT
Stuart Schreiber (Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA)
Tel: +1 617 714 7080; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Genomics: Genome sequences predict human population history (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature10231
*** This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 13 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 14 July, but at a later date. ***
An approach to assess human population sizes between approximately ten thousand and one million years ago is described in Nature this week. The analysis, which uses genome sequence data of individuals from around the world, suggests that although the divergence of genetically modern humans may have started as early as 100–120 thousand years ago, considerable genetic exchanges may have continued until about 20–40 thousand years ago.
The history of human population size is important to understanding human evolution. Heng Li and Richard Durbin use complete genome sequences of Chinese, Korean, European and Yoruba (West African) individuals to look in detail at the history of human population sizes. The results indicate that European and Chinese populations had very similar size histories until 10–20 thousand years ago. Furthermore, European, Chinese and African populations had an elevated effective population size between 60 and 250 thousand years ago.
CONTACT
Richard Durbin (The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK)
Tel: +44 1223 834244; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] Climate change: A downside to the terrestrial carbon sink (pp 214-216; N&V)
The mitigating effect of terrestrial ecosystems on anthropogenic climate change will be less than has been expected, suggests a paper in this week’s Nature. The explanation lies in increased emissions of the potent greenhouse gases nitrous oxide and methane from soils exposed to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
Predicting the effects of increased CO2 levels on climate is a complex business, because of the many feedbacks — physical, chemical and biological — that come into play. For example, increased CO2 is known to stimulate plant growth, leading to increased carbon storage in soils, which offsets some of the original increase. Changes in soil conditions might also be expected to alter the production and consumption of the strong greenhouse gases nitrous oxide and methane; but until now the evidence bearing on this question has been piecemeal.
Kees van Groenigen and colleagues present a quantitative synthesis of 152 observations from 49 experimental studies, which shows that increased CO2 stimulates nitrous oxide emissions from upland soils and methane emissions from rice paddies and natural wetlands. The authors conclude that these emissions should negate at least 16.6per cent of the mitigation previously expected to arise from terrestrial carbon storage — implying that the capacity of land ecosystems to slow climate warming has been overestimated.
CONTACT
Kees van Groenigen (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA)
Tel: +1 928 523 5897; E-mail: [email protected]
Alexander Knohl (Georg-August University of Göttingen, Germany) N&V author
Tel: +49 551 39 3682; E-mail: [email protected]
[6] Organic chemistry: Natural product family reunion (pp 183-188)
Organic chemists frequently synthesize architecturally complex secondary metabolites (natural products) one at a time, with each molecule typically taking several person-years to make in the laboratory. A way of more rapidly obtaining several structurally diverse natural products at one time from a common molecular scaffold is described in this week’s issue of Nature.
Although the field of total synthesis has evolved dramatically over the past sixty years, several challenges remain, including the production of sufficient quantities of compounds for biological studies or therapeutic applications and the rapid generation of large collections of natural product ‘families’. Inspired by the strategies nature employs to make natural products, David MacMillan and colleagues produce six well-known alkaloids using organocascade catalysis, rapidly generating strychnine, aspidospermidine, vincadifformine, akuammicine, kopsanone and kopsinine from a common intermediate. The authors propose that this strategy, termed ‘collective total synthesis’, could be used to generate other natural product families that have yet to succumb to traditional total synthesis.
CONTACT
David MacMillan (Princeton University, NJ, USA)
Tel: +1 626 354 7502; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] Quantum physics: The gentlest measurement (pp 210-213; N&V)
An ‘ideal’ quantum measurement — one that detects the state of an object with only the minimum disturbance required by the laws of quantum mechanics — is reported in this week’s Nature.
In quantum physics, the very act of measurement changes the state of the object being measured — a phenomenon known as ‘back-action’. Part of this back-action is unavoidable, arising from the collapse of the object’s wavefunction into a state observable by the measuring apparatus. But in real laboratory measurements, the back-action is almost always much larger than this minimum quantity. For example, methods that use light to detect single atoms or ions invariably involve spontaneous scattering of photons, which exchange energy with the measured object, changing its state.
Jakob Reichel and colleagues now show that, by confining an atom in an optical cavity, they can circumvent the problem of spontaneous scattering. The strong coupling of the atom to the cavity allows the state of the atom to be probed by sensing the interaction of light with the cavity. In effect, the photons measure the atom without entering the cavity.
This ability to determine an atom’s quantum state without energy exchange could simplify the implementation of quantum computing schemes using neutral atoms, by making it easier to reuse atomic quantum bits.
CONTACT
Jakob Reichel (ENS, CNRS, Université Pierre et Marie Curie – Paris 6, France)
Tel: +33 1 44 32 33 79; E-mail: [email protected]
Peter Maunz (Duke University, Durham, NC, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 919 660 5156; E-mail: [email protected]
[8] And finally... Breathe easy (pp 196-200; N&V)
A new double-pronged approach to spinal cord repair prompts regeneration and significantly improves respiratory function in rats, a Nature paper reveals.
The technique, devised by Jerry Silver and colleagues, involves grafting a piece of the host’s own peripheral nerve to ‘bridge’ the damaged section of spinal cord, and subsequent treatment with a chondroitinase enzyme. The graft contains cells that help nourish and guide the regrowth of damaged nerves, whilst the enzyme breaks down regeneration-blocking inhibitory molecules and helps spared nerve cells generate new connections.
Spinal cord injuries often occur ‘high up’ the spinal cord close to the skull, severing nerve connections to the diaphragm and causing serious respiratory problems. This study suggests that regeneration and restoration of diaphragm function may be possible after certain types of spinal cord trauma.
CONTACT
Jerry Silver (Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, OH, USA)
E-mail: [email protected]
Zhigang He (Children's Hospital Boston, MA, USA) N&V author
Tel: +1 617 919 2353; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[9] Dicer recognizes the 5' end of RNA for efficient and accurate processing (pp 201-205)
[10] Tumor Hypoxia Recruits Regulatory T Cells via the CCL28 Chemokine to Promote Immune Tolerance and Angiogenesis (pp 226-230)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
*** These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 13 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 them on this release to avoid multiple mailings they will not appear in print on 14 July, but at a later date. ***
[11] MicroRNA-Mediated Conversion of Human Fibroblasts to Neurons
DOI: 10.1038/nature10323
[12] The ELF4-ELF3-LUX Complex Links the Circadian Clock to Diurnal Control of Hypocotyl Growth
DOI: 10.1038/nature10182
[13] Multi-domain conformational selection underlies pre-mRNA splicing regulation by U2AF
DOI: 10.1038/nature10171
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
Vancouver: 10
FRANCE
La Farlède: 7
Lyon: 1
Paris: 7
Pessac: 13
Valbonne: 1
GERMANY
Garching: 13
Göttingen: 1
Heidelberg: 13
Neuherberg: 13
IRELAND
Dublin: 5
JAPAN
Hongo: 2
Tsukuba: 2
KOREA
Seoul: 9
SPAIN
Barcelona: 13
UNITED KINGDOM
Hinxton: 4
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Arizona
Flagstaff: 5
California
La Jolla: 12
Stanford: 11
Florida
Gainesville: 5
Massachusetts
Cambridge: 3, 4
Charlestown: 3
Missouri
St Louis: 11
New Jersey
Princeton: 6
New York
Ithaca: 1
New York: 9
Rochester: 1
Ohio
Cleveland: 8
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 10
Washington
Seattle: 12
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