Major African campaigns targeting malaria and HIV could help millions, but key concerns over their long-term effects should not be forgotten.
doi: 10.1038/503165a
Time is running out to comment on the NIH’s plan for sharing genomic data.
doi: 10.1038/503165b
Prejudice, not evidence, is too often the basis for government drug policies.
doi: 10.1038/503166a
Budget woes force institutes to scrutinize expensive, non-competitive programmes.
doi: 10.1038/503173a
Costs of reducing emissions may be flashpoints in path towards 2015 Paris treaty.
doi: 10.1038/503174a
Accelerator ring would be 100 kilometres around and run at seven times the energy of the Large Hadron Collider.
doi: 10.1038/503177a
NASA’s MAVEN orbiter aims to unravel the mystery of the red planet’s missing atmosphere.
doi: 10.1038/503178a
Researchers seek to fend off restrictions on National Science Foundation grant programmes.
doi: 10.1038/503179a
A dedicated website for sharing biology papers before peer review leaves journals divided.
doi: 10.1038/503180a
HIVの拡大を防ぐため、アフリカでは2000万人への割礼実施が計画されているが、危険な性行動の増加など、悪影響を懸念する声もある。
doi: 10.1038/503182a
アフリカのいくつかの国で進められている季節性マラリアの化学的予防（SMC）策は、マラリアに強力な打撃を与える可能性があるが、耐性を生む懸念もある。
doi: 10.1038/503186a
一連の薄層が規則的に繰り返される構造の半導体中にエッチングされた小孔のランダム配列は、中赤外波長のレーザー光を放射することが実証された。このデバイスはセンシングや画像化への応用が考えられる。
doi: 10.1038/503200a
スプライソソームの活性部位の化学分析から、スプライシングを受けたメッセンジャーRNAの産生に関わる触媒金属イオンを適切に配置しているのは、この酵素複合体のRNA成分であることが分かった。
doi: 10.1038/nature12705
直径20 mの「天界の岩」が地球大気に突入した最近の事件は、素晴らしい天空ショーであっただけでなく、高速での衝突についての我々の理解を進めるかけがえのないデータの宝庫をもたらすことになった。
doi: 10.1038/503202a
腸や肺の分化した細胞は、いざ必要となれば成体幹細胞として働き、幹細胞のプールを含めて、組織内のさまざまな種類の細胞を作り出すことが、NatureとCellにそれぞれ掲載された2つの研究で明らかにされた。
doi: 10.1038/nature12706
緩和時間の長い単一電子スピンは、量子計算やスピンダイナミクスの解明に欠かせない。分の大台に乗る、著しく長い緩和時間が、今回固相系で実現された。
doi: 10.1038/503205a
貯水池の建設によって生息域が分断された孤立林中で、建設から25年以内に小型哺乳動物がほぼ完全に絶滅したことは、遅れて起こる生物多様性消失の衝撃的な例である。
doi: 10.1038/503206a
予防に使えるHIVワクチンを作製するための努力から、ウイルス複製を強力に抑制するモノクローナル抗体が見つかった。サルでの研究で、このような薬剤がHIV感染の治療に有効であることが示された。
doi: 10.1038/nature12703
The phonon is the physical particle responsible for the transmission of sound and heat; controlling the properties of phonons in materials could trigger many advances, which are reviewed here.
doi: 10.1038/nature12608
Using in vivo lineage tracing in mice and sorted cells in culture, the ability of stably committed cells to dedifferentiate into basal stem cells in the mouse trachea is investigated: the findings suggest that the dedifferentiation of committed cell types into stem cells may contribute generally to regeneration in higher vertebrates in different organ and injury contexts.
doi: 10.1038/nature12777
Treatment of SHIV-infected monkeys with potent broadly neutralizing anti-HIV-1 monoclonal antibodies resulted in rapid control of viral replication in both peripheral blood and tissues; viral rebound was linked to decreasing antibody concentrations and not the generation of escape mutations, and setpoint viral load following viral rebound remained lower than the initial baseline viral load.
doi: 10.1038/nature12744
The spliceosome is shown to catalyse splicing through the RNA and not the protein components of the spliceosome; pre-messenger RNA splicing requires U6 snRNA acting by a mechanism similar to that used by group II self-splicing introns.
doi: 10.1038/nature12734
Analysis of video records of the Chelyabinsk superbolide of 15 February 2013 show that its orbit was sufficiently similar to the orbit of asteroid 86039 (1999 NC43) to suggest that the two were once part of the same object.
doi: 10.1038/nature12671
The damage caused by the asteroid 17–20 metres in diameter that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on 15 February 2013 is estimated here to have an energy equivalent to about 500 kilotons of TNT.
doi: 10.1038/nature12741
Single magnetic atoms on non-magnetic surfaces have magnetic moments that are usually destabilized within a microsecond, too speedily to be useful, but here the magnetic moments of single holmium atoms on a highly conductive metallic substrate can reach lifetimes of the order of minutes.
doi: 10.1038/nature12759
Different polymers can be used in combination to produce coexisting nanoparticles of different symmetry and tailored to co-assemble into well-ordered binary and ternary hierarchical structures.
doi: 10.1038/nature12610
Chemical, isotopic and physical evidence indicate that some of the groundwater in the Chesapeake Bay crater is remnant Early Cretaceous North Atlantic sea water, probably 100–145 million years old, with an average salinity of about 70‰, which is twice that of modern sea water.
doi: 10.1038/nature12714
Fossils of four insects and one larva from the Carboniferous Pennsylvanian epoch are described; these are very small relative to other known Palaeozoic-era insects, and reveal a previously unknown diversity of early eumetabolan insects, although the lineage radiated more successfully only after the mass extinctions at the end of the Permian period.
doi: 10.1038/nature12629
Two-photon calcium imaging experiments reveal that ring neurons in the Drosophila central complex represent visual features and show direction-selective orientation tuning, resembling simple cells in mammalian primary visual cortex; future fly studies may enhance our understanding of circuit computations underlying visually guided action selection.
doi: 10.1038/nature12601
Deletions of chromosome 22q13.3 cause Phelan–McDermid syndrome (PMDS), a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with autism; here induced pluripotent stem cells from PMDS patients with autism are used to produce neurons, they are shown to have reduced SHANK3 expression and a defect in excitatory synaptic transmission which can be restored either by increasing SHANK3 or with insulin-like growth factor 1.
doi: 10.1038/nature12618
Variation in ATG16L1, a protein involved in autophagy, confers risk for Crohn’s disease, but mice with hypomorphic ATG16L1 activity do not develop spontaneous intestinal inflammation; this study shows that autophagy compensates for endoplasmic reticulum stress — common in inflammatory bowel disease epithelium — specifically in Paneth cells, with Crohn’s-disease-like inflammation of the ileum originating from this cell type when both pathways are compromised.
doi: 10.1038/nature12599
A new generation of broad and potent anti-HIV-1 monoclonal antibodies has recently been isolated; co-administration of two such antibodies is shown here to result in rapid and potent suppression of plasma viraemia in five chronically SHIV-infected macaques that lasts for several weeks.
doi: 10.1038/nature12746
A new protein, Arpin, is identified that inhibits the Arp2/3 complex and controls cell migration by decreasing cell speed and the directional persistence of migration; this inhibitory circuit is under the control of the small GTPase Rac1, and Arpin depletion causes faster lamellipodia protrusion and increased cell migration.
doi: 10.1038/nature12611
It is widely accepted that migrating cells and tissues navigate along pre-patterned chemoattractant gradients; here it is shown that migrating tissues can also determine their own direction by generating local gradients of chemokine activity, via polarized receptor-mediated internalization, that are sufficient to ensure robust collective migration.
doi: 10.1038/nature12635
A novel approach to analyse high-depth Hi-C data provides a comprehensive chromatin interaction map at approximately 5–10 kb resolution in human fibroblasts; this reveals that TNF-α-responsive enhancers are already in contact with target promoters before signalling and that this chromatin looping is a strong predictor of gene induction.
doi: 10.1038/nature12644
Binding modes and molecular mechanisms of several allosteric modulators of a prototypical G-protein-coupled receptor are revealed using atomic-level simulations and validated by the rational design of a modulator with substantially altered effects.
doi: 10.1038/nature12595
