This press release contains:
• Summaries of newsworthy papers:
Biology: The genetics of multiple sclerosis *PRESS BRIEFING*
Atmospheric chemistry: Mysterious methane
Comment: ArXiv turns 20
Biotechnology: Reversing the route to biofuels
Quantum mechanics: Ion micro-management
And finally... Cod genome reveals unusual immunology
• Mention of papers to be published at the same time
• Geographical listing of authors
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[1] Biology: The genetics of multiple sclerosis (pp 214-219) *PRESS BRIEFING*
A large, international, collaborative study has identified many new genetic variations linked to multiple sclerosis (MS). The study, reported in this week’s Nature, provides new clues to the mechanisms underlying this complex neurodegenerative disorder.
The genome-wide association study (GWAS), led by Alasatir Compston, Peter Donnelly and colleagues, looked for genetic differences between more than 9,000 people with MS and more than 17,000 controls. Approximately 20 known MS-linked regions of DNA were confirmed, but the study also identified an additional 29 novel susceptibility loci.
These data confirm a link between MS and a large genetic region called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which plays a role in the immune system and autoimmunity. An overrepresentation of genes that influence T-cell maturation also indicates that these white blood cells are somehow implicated in the disease process.
CONTACT
Peter Donnelly (Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford, UK)
Tel: +44 1865 287 725; E-mail: [email protected]
Alastair Compston (University of Cambridge, UK)
Tel: +44 1223 217 091; E-mail: [email protected]
**Please note a press briefing will take place UNDER STRICT EMBARGO at 10.00am London time on Wednesday 10 August. This will be held in room Mendel 1 at the Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road, London. There are no dial-in facilities but a recording of the press briefing will be available on the Nature press site soon afterwards.**
For more information please contact the Nature press office.
[2] & [3] Atmospheric chemistry: Mysterious methane (pp 194-201; N&V)
A puzzling decline in the growth rate of atmospheric methane finds conflicting explanations in this week’s Nature. Two independent studies, based on different data sets and analytical approaches, reach differing conclusions, but both point to human activities as the main cause of the slowdown.
Methane (CH4¬) is the most abundant hydrocarbon in the atmosphere, and is second in importance only to carbon dioxide among the greenhouse gases that are directly affected by humans.
Atmospheric methane concentrations increased through much of the twentieth century, then levelled off during the past three decades, with signs of renewed growth appearing only very recently. Previous investigations of the late-twentieth-century slowdown have identified declining methane emissions from fossil fuels and wetlands as important causes, but large uncertainties remain.
Murat Aydin and colleagues address this question by investigating the history of fossil-fuel emissions, based on measurements of another hydrocarbon, ethane (C2H6), trapped in air bubbles in perennial snowpack from Greenland and Antarctica. Combining their ethane measurements with a simple atmospheric model, the authors derive a fossil-fuel emission history that suggests a need to reassess existing estimates based on reported production. As ethane and methane are both released by fossil-fuel usage and biomass burning, the authors are able to conclude that the late-twentieth-century atmospheric methane slowdown was caused by a larger decrease in fossil-fuel sources from the 1980s than had previously been shown.
Meanwhile, Fuu Ming Kai and colleagues take advantage of the different isotopic signatures of methane from fossil-fuel and microbial sources (primarily wetlands and rice paddies) to constrain the contribution of these sources to the atmospheric methane budget. Using a simple atmospheric model to simulate observed inter-hemispheric differences in methane concentration and isotopic composition, these authors exclude reduced fossil-fuel emissions as the main cause of the slowdown. Instead, they suggest that long-term reductions in Northern Hemisphere microbial emissions are primarily responsible, with reduced emissions from rice agriculture in Asia able to provide about half of the required decrease.
CONTACT
Murat Aydin (University of California, Irvine, CA, USA) Author paper [2]
Tel: +1 949 824 5693; E-mail: [email protected]
Fuu Ming Kai (Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology, Singapore) Author paper [3]
Tel: +65 6516 1463; E-mail: [email protected]
Martin Heimann (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany) N&V author
Tel: +49 3641 57 6350; E-mail: [email protected]
Comment: ArXiv turns 20 (pp 145-147)
20 years ago this month, physicist Paul Ginsparg launched arXiv, an electronic bulletin board to simplify the exchange of preprints (unpublished papers) between researchers. As Ginsparg steps down from running arXiv, he reflects on the past two decades and on the future of scholarly communication in a Comment in this week’s Nature.
One motivation for arXiv was to level the research playing field. Previously, paper preprints were only circulated to a select few, but arXiv allowed anyone with online access to upload and download new research. In this, it has been hugely successful, says Ginsparg. ArXiv now receives about 75,000 preprints each year, and serves roughly 1 million full-text downloads every week.
“For me, the repository was supposed to be a three-hour tour, not a life sentence,” writes Ginsparg. So the founder is taking the opportunity afforded by the 20th anniversary to step aside from daily administrative activities, leaving the management of the server in the hands of the staff of Cornell University Library in Ithaca, New York, and its community of users. Ginsparg is both thrilled and amazed by the many technological and social advances he has witnessed online in the past 20 years.
But one of the biggest surprises is that scholarly publishing as a whole remains in transition, with change occurring more slowly than expected. Back in the early 1990s few would have expected print journals to thrive alongside web access to new research ideas — and yet they continue do so today.
Ginsparg hopes that future generations will continue the online revolution that began in the early 1990s, “fundamentally transforming the ways in which we process and organize scientific data”.
CONTACT
Paul Ginsparg (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA)
Tel: +1 607 255 7371; E-mail: [email protected]
[4] Biotechnology: Reversing the route to biofuels (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature10333
*** This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 10 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 11 August, but at a later date. ***
A new, high-yielding method for producing potential biofuels is revealed in this week’s issue of Nature.
Endogenous metabolic pathways mediate the formation of amino acids, fatty acids and secondary metabolites from simple starting materials like acetate. These biosynthetic pathways can be exploited, or completely re-engineered, to produce complex compounds that show promise as biofuels.
Ramon Gonzalez and colleagues show that the endogenous beta-oxidation cycle of fatty acids — which normally converts long-chain fatty acids into acetyl-CoA — can be run in the reverse direction, efficiently synthesizing alcohols, fatty acids and carboxylic acids. These potential biofuels were produced in Escherichia coli, but the ubiquitous nature of the enzymes involved suggests that the process should work in other industrial organisms.
CONTACT
Ramon Gonzalez (Rice University, Houston, TX, USA)
Tel: +1 713 348 4893; E-mail: [email protected]
[5] & [6] Quantum mechanics: Ion micro-management (pp 181-188)
Approaches that enable microwave control over trapped atomic ions for quantum information processing are described in two papers in Nature this week. The work is important for the development of large-scale ion trap quantum computers.
Trapped atomic ions can be coherently manipulated with laser light, but similar control is difficult to achieve with radio frequency or microwave radiation. Christian Ospelkaus and colleagues report a device that enables microwave control, using the magnetic fields generated by electrodes integrated into a micro-fabricated ion trap. The internal quantum states of ions held in a trap can be coherently manipulated, and entangled states generated.
In a second paper, Christof Wunderlich and team report an approach based on applying microwave pulses to trapped ions, which transforms them into a state isolated from outside disturbances. This technique significantly extends the coherence time of the system, decisively improving the prospects of microwave-driven ion-trap quantum information processing.
CONTACT
Christian Ospelkaus (Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany) Author paper [5]
Tel: +49 511 762 17644; E-mail: [email protected]
Dietrich Leibfried (National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO, USA) Author paper [5]
Tel: +1 303 497 7880; E-mail: [email protected]
Christof Wunderlich (University of Siegen, Germany) Author paper [6]
Tel: +49 271 740 3757; E-mail: [email protected]
Winfried Hensinger (University of Sussex, Brighton, UK) N&V author
Tel: +44 1273 877672; E-mail: [email protected]
[7] And finally... Cod genome reveals unusual immunology (AOP)
DOI: 10.1038/nature10342
*** This paper will be published electronically on Nature's website on 10 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 11 August, but at a later date. ***
The sequencing of the Atlantic cod genome has revealed a unique immune system. The work, published this week in Nature, could be important for understanding how to manage disease in both wild stocks and farming attempts.
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) II is an adaptive immune system feature conserved across jawed vertebrates. Kjetill Jakobsen and colleagues analysed the cod genome and found that it has lost this complex, whose function is to help recognize extracellular peptides. To avoid immunodeficiency, cod appears to have instead acquired more MHC I genes — normally involved in recognition of intracellular peptides — as well as changes to its innate immune system.
This finding challenges fundamental assumptions about the evolution of the vertebrate immune system. The cod immune system is of particular interest to farmers attempting to domesticate the species and this work may therefore lead to more effective methods for managing disease in this fish.
CONTACT
Kjetill Jakobsen (University of Oslo, Norway)
Tel: +47 2285 4605; E-mail: [email protected]
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE…
[8] A continuum model for tumour suppression (pp 163-169)
[9] Hydrogen is an energy source for hydrothermal vent symbioses (pp 176-180; N&V)
ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION
*** These papers will be published electronically on Nature's website on 10 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 them on this release to avoid multiple mailings they will not appear in print on 11 August, but at a later date. ***
[10] A role for cohesin in T cell receptor rearrangement and thymocyte differentiation.
DOI: 10.1038/nature10312
[11] A young source for the Hawaiian plume
DOI: 10.1038/nature10321
[12] High plant diversity is needed to maintain ecosystem services
DOI: 10.1038/nature10282
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
Box Hill: 1
Brisbane: 1
Callaghan: 1
Hobart: 1
Melbourne: 1
New Lambton: 1
Parkville: 1
Perth: 1
Richmond: 12
Southport: 1
Subiaco: 1
Sydney: 1
BELGIUM
Leuven: 1
Melsbroek: 1
CANADA
Montreal: 1, 12
DENMARK
Copenhagen: 1
FINLAND
Helsinki: 1
Oulu: 1
Seinäjoki: 1
Tampere: 1
FRANCE
Évry: 1, 9
Grenoble: 11
Marseille: 1
Nancy: 1
Paris: 1
Reims: 1
Rennes: 1
Roscoff: 9
Toulouse: 1
Villejuif: 1
GERMANY
Berlin: 1, 7
Braunschweig: 5
Bremen: 9
Düsseldorf: 1
Freiburg: 12
Hamburg: 1, 9
Hannover: 1, 5
Kiel: 1
Leipzig: 9, 12
Mainz: 1, 11
Munich: 1
Siegen: 6
Ulm: 6
IRELAND
Dublin: 1, 12
ITALY
Brescia: 1
Gallarate: 1
Milan: 1
Milano: 1
Novara: 1
Pavia: 1
Turin: 1
NETHERLANDS
Nijmegen: 10
Utrecht: 1
Wageningen: 12
NEW ZEALAND
Auckland: 1
Christchurch: 1
Otago: 1
NORWAY
Ås: 7
Bergen: 1, 7
Bodø: 7
Hamar: 7
Oslo: 1, 7
Tromsø: 7
POLAND
Lodz: 1
RUSSIA
Moscow: 11
Novosibirsk: 11
SINGAPORE
Singapore: 1, 3
SPAIN
Barcelona: 1
SWEDEN
Stockholm: 1
Uppsala: 1
SWITZERLAND
Zurich: 12
UNITED KINGDOM
Belfast: 1
Cambridge: 1, 10
Cardiff: 1
Dundee: 1
Hinxton: 1, 7
Liverpool: 1
London: 1, 10
Oxford: 1, 10
Plymouth: 1
Salford: 1
Stoke-on-Trent: 1
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
California
Berkeley: 1
Irvine: 1, 2, 3
Los Angeles: 1
Norco: 3
Oakland: 1
San Francisco: 1
Santa Cruz: 12
Colorado
Boulder: 2, 5
Connecticut
Branford: 7
New Haven: 1, 10
Florida
Miami: 1
Georgia
Atlanta: 5
Iowa
Ames: 12
Massachusetts
Boston: 1, 8
Brunswick: 2
Cambridge: 1, 9
Minnesota
St Paul: 12
Missouri
St Louis: 1
North Carolina
Durham: 10
Pennsylvania
Philadelphia: 1, 8
Tennessee
Nashville: 1
Texas
Houston: 4
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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