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Nature press release for 26 April issue
April 26, 2001[4101045] MEDICINE: DOWN THE RIVER (pp1045-1046; 1046-1047; 1047-1048)
In his 1999 book The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS, journalist Edward Hopper promulgated the theory that chimpanzee kidney cultures were used in the preparation of oral polio vaccine stocks used in Africa during the late 1950s and were responsible for introducing a precursor of the AIDS virus HIV-1 into humans. Now three independent Brief Communications in this week’s Nature pour cold water on these claims and settle the issue once and for all.
First, N Berry at the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control in the UK, and colleagues, report that analysis of amplified DNA from frozen samples of the suspect vaccine has failed to reveal any HIV-1-related nucleic acids or chimpanzee mitochondrial DNA.
Second, Simon Wain-Hobson at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and colleagues, carried out a similar analysis and confirm that only macaque monkey cells, rather than chimpanzee cells, were present in the vaccines in question.
And finally, Edward C Holmes at the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues, report on a phylogenetic study of modern HIV-1 strains that identifies the last common ancestor of the main group of HIV-1 viruses (group ‘M’) as a virus present in a human host, rather than being transferred from another primate.
“Some beautiful facts have destroyed an ugly theory,” says Robin Weiss of the Wohlvirion Centre in London, UK, in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
N Berry tel +44 1707 654 753, e-mail nberry@nibsc.ac.uk
Simon Wain-Hobson tel +33 1 45 68 88 21, e-mail simon@pasteur.fr
Edward C Holmes tel +44 1865 271282, e-mail edward.holmes@zoo.ox.ac.uk
[4101067] TECHNOLOGY: LONG DISTANCE QUANTUM LEAP (pp1067-1070)
Until now the development of quantum cryptography has been constrained by the difficulty of keeping the quantum message readable over long distances. Anton Zeilinger and co-workers from the University of Vienna in Austria show how to overcome this limitation in this week’s Nature.
A quantum message is a key through which coded information, sent by normal, classical means, may be decrypted. The key is encrypted in photons, quantum particles of light, which cannot be examined without leaving a telltale mark.
Zeilinger and colleagues explore a popular version of quantum cryptography proposed in 1991 by Artur Ekert of Oxford University. Here the sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob) each receive one of a pair of photons in a so-called entangled state: their polarization states are interdependent. If an eavesdropper (Eve) makes a measurement on the photon sent to Bob, she cannot avoid affecting that observed by Alice too, because of the quantum entanglement. Even if Eve then sends an identical photon to Bob in an attempt to hide her interception, Alice and Bob can detect the disruption of the entanglement between their photons. This scheme has previously been demonstrated experimentally, but only over short distances. As the transmission distance gets longer, random noise in the system begins to obscure the entanglement between photons.
Zeilinger and colleagues describe a new, simple method for entanglement purification that should work with current technology. All that is needed is a polarizing beam splitter, a special kind of mirror that redirects two incoming photons depending on their polarization state. This device generates some highly entangled states from ones that were only weakly entangled. Alice and Bob can detect which these are, and use them alone for transmitting the key. So the degradation of entanglement can be compensated by simply sending more photon pairs: the beam-splitter device will ensure that at least some of these are registered by Alice and Bob as highly entangled, and thus reliable for transmitting the key, even over long distances.
CONTACT:
Anton Zeilinger tel +43 1 4277 51201, e-mail zeilinger-office@exp.univie.ac.at
[4101023] POLICY: TANGLED WEB (pp1023-1024; 1024-1025; 1026)
This week’s Commentary pages feature three perspectives as part of Nature’s continuing web debate on future access to the primary scientific literature [see http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/index.html].
Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and James Hendler, responsible for research on agent-based computing at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, argue that the current debate over web publishing of scientific research is just the beginning of a more profound change in the way scientific knowledge is produced and shared. The web that we know now, argue Berners-Lee and Hendler, is far short of reaching its full potential, because it amounts largely to a repository where humans simply search and retrieve information. Their vision of a semantic web is one where new technologies will allow computers to understand and communicate with each other, opening up a host of new opportunities.
Professor Ira Mellman, chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University and Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, urges journals to make their content freely available at their own websites 6 months after publication. He argues that the ‘Public Library of Science’ boycott by scientists should focus on this end rather than on the misguided and unworkable goal of making journals allow their published papers to be freely posted on any web server.
Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at Southampton University, UK, and founder and Editor of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, proposes ‘freeing’ the refereed research literature via an authors’ self-archiving system that would turn publishers into providers of a peer-reviewing service rather than producers of journals.
CONTACT:
James Hendler tel +1 703 696 2238, e-mail jhendler@darpa.mil
Ira Mellman tel +1 203 785 4303, e-mail ira.mellman@yale.edu
Stevan Harnad tel +44 23 80 592 582 , e-mail harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
[4101111] LIFELINES: NEW MOUSE CANCER MODEL (pp1111-1116; N&V)
A new improved mouse model of sporadic human lung cancers is reported this week by Tyler Jacks and colleagues of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts, and colleagues. The team has produced a strain of mice in which a mutant cancer-causing K-ras gene is generated at random in some cells by means of spontaneous recombination — the shuffling of segments of DNA — between or within chromosomes. This randomness echoes the sporadic occurrence of K-ras mutations in many human cancers.
The mice showed a high incidence of lung tumours — including adenocarcinomas, cancers that are predominant in humans and have a particularly poor prognosis — as well as some lymphomas (cancers of the blood) and skin papillomas. Metastasis, the migration of tumour cells to other parts of the body, occurred infrequently. Mice also deficient in p53 — a well-known protein that normally inhibits cancer development — had a greater number of malignant tumours.
Such models “should allow us to work out the sequence of events in tumour development [and] seem well suited for testing prevention strategies and treatments,” comments Anton Berns of The Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Tyler Jacks tel +1 617 253 0262, e-mail tjacks@mit.edu
Anton Berns tel +31 10 512 1991, e-mail tberns@nki.nl
[4101091] EVOLUTION: SLAVE TO SIZE (pp1091–1096; N&V)
Tom Cavalier-Smith of the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues this week present the genome sequence of the nucleomorph of the algae Guillardia theta. Once a swallowed primitive plant cell, the nucleomorph is now worn down to remnants, but remains viable as an independent nucleus.
Its genome is both a monument to stripped-down efficiency and a ghost of its former self. It contains 531 genes in the space of just 551,264 base pairs, making it the most gene-dense eukaryotic (that is, non-bacterial) genome known. Multiple gene copies are almost non-existent — and some genes even overlap. It makes the human genome (6,000 times the size) seem profligate by comparison. Severe editing has expunged nearly all genes for metabolic functions: apart from a few necessary for the adjacent chloroplast, most of the genes exist to keep the nucleomorph itself from disappearing entirely.
This nucleomorph could be as close to the smallest possible eukaryote genome as it is possible to get. As such, it will provide a wealth of insights for research into the evolution of genomes generally. Paul R. Gilson of Deakin University, Victoria, Australia, and Geoffrey I. McFadden of the University of Melbourne, Australia, discuss this “extraordinary case of genetic miniaturization” in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Tom Cavalier-Smith tel +44 1865 281 065, e-mail tom.cavalier-smith@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Geoffrey McFadden tel +61 39344 5054, e-mail mc-fadden@botany.unimelb.edu.au
[4101099] LIFELINES: BACTERIA TAKE THEIR TOLL (pp1099-1103; 1103-1107; 1018-1020)
Two letters and a news feature this week look at how our immune systems defend us against bacterial attack. In the first of the papers Alan Aderem of the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, Washington, and colleagues report that a protein, TLR5, probably evolved to help mammals to detect the flagella with which many bacteria propel themselves. TLR5 is a member of the evolutionarily conserved Toll-like receptor protein family.
The second paper, from Marco Colonna of Basel Institute for Immunology, Switzerland, and colleagues, demonstrates a critical function of another protein, TREM-1, in acute inflammatory responses to bacteria. TREM-1 seems to amplify the inflammatory responses triggered by bacterial and fungal infections — implicating it as a potential therapeutic target for septic shock.
A related News Feature examines the rush of recent discoveries that have propelled Toll-like receptors and innate immunity to the forefront of immunological research.
CONTACT:
Alan Aderem tel +1 206 732 1203, e-mail aderem@systemsbiology.org
Marco Colonna tel +41 61 605 1393, e-mail colonna@bii.ch
[4101049] EARTH: MEGABLOBS MIX UP MANTLE (pp1049-1056; N&V)
Large blobs contribute to ebb and flow in the Earth’s mantle, Alessandro M. Forte of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and Jerry Mitrovica, of the University of Toronto, Canada, report in this week’s Nature. Combining a wide range of geophysical observations with mineral physics data, the duo develop a model of global mantle flow and structure. They show that large-scale heterogeneity in the composition of the deep mantle may provide clues about the long-term evolution of the Earth.
Forte and Mitrovica verify that the whole mantle appears to be involved in a single convective system that is driven primarily by thermal anomalies. In addition, they find evidence of ‘megablobs’ within the lower mantle. The magnitude of the density variations is sufficient to lead to the so-called ‘doming’ mode of convection, in which large blobs of compositionally distinct mantle move up and down every so often. This finding is dynamically at odds with recent proposals of a deep mantle that is convectively isolated from the rest of the mantle.
In an accompanying News and Views article, Michael Manga, of the University of Oregon, discusses the background and implications of this work.
CONTACT:
Alessandro Forte tel +1 519 661 3188, e-mail aforte@uwo.ca
Michael Manga tel +1 541 346 5574, e-mail manga@newberry.uoregon.edu
[4101084] RELICS: FEATHERED FRIEND SPREAD-EAGLED (pp1084–1088)
Fossils of ‘feathered’ dinosaurs that promise to shed light on the origin of birds are becoming more common but, like most fossil skeletons, these dinosaurs are rarely complete, and the bones are often fragmentary and disarticulated.
This makes the feathered dinosaur described this week by Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and colleagues all the more special. The 126–147-million-year-old Chinese fossil is a complete skeleton preserved spread-eagled on a slab, allowing the examination of feather-like filaments over the body in unprecedented detail.
CONTACT:
Mark A. Norell tel +1 212 769 5804, email norell@amnh.org
[4101088] COVER: EUROPEAN BEEF IMPORTED FROM NEAR EAST (pp1088–1091)
Molecular biology meets archaeology in a study on p1088 that sets out to answer an age-old question: were European cattle domesticated in situ from their wild progenitor, the aurochs (Bos primigenius), or were they exotic foreign imports?
The answer seems to be the latter, according to Daniel G. Bradley of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and colleagues, whose examination of DNA from 392 extant animals from Europe, Africa and the Near East — together with DNA from 4 English fossils — shows that the DNA of European cattle has its roots in the Near East.
CONTACT:
Daniel G. Bradley tel +353 1 608 1088, email dbradley@tcd.ie
[4101073] CLIMATE: IN DEEP-WATER (pp1073-1077)
The North Atlantic circulation in the last interglacial period could serve as an analogue of future ocean dynamics in this region, in a climate warmed by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, Claude Hillaire-Marcel of the University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada, and his co-workers show in this week’s issue of Nature.
At present, two distinct water masses prevail in the abyssal Atlantic Ocean, which have sunk to their depths in the Nordic seas and the Labrador Sea, respectively. But according to model simulations, in a warmer future deep water formation in the Labrador Sea could stop. During the last interglacial period, which was about 2 °C warmer than today, no deep water formed in the Labrador Sea, Hillaire-Marcel’s team report.
The researchers use foraminifera — small organisms living in the sediment and in the water column — from sediment cores in the deep Labrador to reconstruct the past structure of the water column. Their work shows a single uniform water mass below the surface layer, originating from the Nordic seas, rather than two layers from different sources as today.
CONTACT:
Claude Hillaire-Marcel (currently in France) tel +33 442 97 15 22, e-mail chenv@uqam.ca
Jean-Claude Mareschal (co-author) tel +1 514 987 4080, e-mail jcm@olympus.geotop.uqam.ca
[4101048] …AND FINALLY: BEE KEEPING TIME (p1048)
Would bees’ body clocks be upset if their lives involved jet travel? Like us, honeybees learn to rest and find food at set times, but unlike us, they can swiftly ‘unlearn’ certain rhythmic behaviours if they need to and still function at top form, Guy Bloch and Gene E. Robinson of the University of Illinois, Urbana, report in a Brief Communication this week.
The researchers find that in hives with a severe staff shortage of young nurse bees to look after the hive’s larvae, older honeybees can revert from foraging, which is closely synchronized with their internal circadian clocks, to resume round-the-clock nursing, which — as any parent knows — is an arrhythmic activity.
“Our findings may have wider implications, given the conservation of some molecular components of biological clocks and of sleep regulation,” Bloch and Robinson conclude.
CONTACT:
Guy Bloch tel +1 217 333 2910, e-mail guybloch@life.uiuc.edu
Nature Publishing Group Reference
This week’s Commentary pages feature three perspectives as part of Nature’s continuing web debate on future access to the primary scientific literature [see http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/index.html].
Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and James Hendler, responsible for research on agent-based computing at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, argue that the current debate over web publishing of scientific research is just the beginning of a more profound change in the way scientific knowledge is produced and shared. The web that we know now, argue Berners-Lee and Hendler, is far short of reaching its full potential, because it amounts largely to a repository where humans simply search and retrieve information. Their vision of a semantic web is one where new technologies will allow computers to understand and communicate with each other, opening up a host of new opportunities.
Professor Ira Mellman, chairman of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University and Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, urges journals to make their content freely available at their own websites 6 months after publication. He argues that the ‘Public Library of Science’ boycott by scientists should focus on this end rather than on the misguided and unworkable goal of making journals allow their published papers to be freely posted on any web server.
Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at Southampton University, UK, and founder and Editor of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, proposes ‘freeing’ the refereed research literature via an authors’ self-archiving system that would turn publishers into providers of a peer-reviewing service rather than producers of journals.
CONTACT:
James Hendler tel +1 703 696 2238, e-mail jhendler@darpa.mil
Ira Mellman tel +1 203 785 4303, e-mail ira.mellman@yale.edu
Stevan Harnad tel +44 23 80 592 582 , e-mail harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
[4101111] LIFELINES: NEW MOUSE CANCER MODEL (pp1111-1116; N&V)
A new improved mouse model of sporadic human lung cancers is reported this week by Tyler Jacks and colleagues of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts, and colleagues. The team has produced a strain of mice in which a mutant cancer-causing K-ras gene is generated at random in some cells by means of spontaneous recombination — the shuffling of segments of DNA — between or within chromosomes. This randomness echoes the sporadic occurrence of K-ras mutations in many human cancers.
The mice showed a high incidence of lung tumours — including adenocarcinomas, cancers that are predominant in humans and have a particularly poor prognosis — as well as some lymphomas (cancers of the blood) and skin papillomas. Metastasis, the migration of tumour cells to other parts of the body, occurred infrequently. Mice also deficient in p53 — a well-known protein that normally inhibits cancer development — had a greater number of malignant tumours.
Such models “should allow us to work out the sequence of events in tumour development [and] seem well suited for testing prevention strategies and treatments,” comments Anton Berns of The Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Tyler Jacks tel +1 617 253 0262, e-mail tjacks@mit.edu
Anton Berns tel +31 10 512 1991, e-mail tberns@nki.nl
[4101091] EVOLUTION: SLAVE TO SIZE (pp1091–1096; N&V)
Tom Cavalier-Smith of the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues this week present the genome sequence of the nucleomorph of the algae Guillardia theta. Once a swallowed primitive plant cell, the nucleomorph is now worn down to remnants, but remains viable as an independent nucleus.
Its genome is both a monument to stripped-down efficiency and a ghost of its former self. It contains 531 genes in the space of just 551,264 base pairs, making it the most gene-dense eukaryotic (that is, non-bacterial) genome known. Multiple gene copies are almost non-existent — and some genes even overlap. It makes the human genome (6,000 times the size) seem profligate by comparison. Severe editing has expunged nearly all genes for metabolic functions: apart from a few necessary for the adjacent chloroplast, most of the genes exist to keep the nucleomorph itself from disappearing entirely.
This nucleomorph could be as close to the smallest possible eukaryote genome as it is possible to get. As such, it will provide a wealth of insights for research into the evolution of genomes generally. Paul R. Gilson of Deakin University, Victoria, Australia, and Geoffrey I. McFadden of the University of Melbourne, Australia, discuss this “extraordinary case of genetic miniaturization” in an accompanying News and Views article.
CONTACT:
Tom Cavalier-Smith tel +44 1865 281 065, e-mail tom.cavalier-smith@zoo.ox.ac.uk
Geoffrey McFadden tel +61 39344 5054, e-mail mc-fadden@botany.unimelb.edu.au
[4101099] LIFELINES: BACTERIA TAKE THEIR TOLL (pp1099-1103; 1103-1107; 1018-1020)
Two letters and a news feature this week look at how our immune systems defend us against bacterial attack. In the first of the papers Alan Aderem of the Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, Washington, and colleagues report that a protein, TLR5, probably evolved to help mammals to detect the flagella with which many bacteria propel themselves. TLR5 is a member of the evolutionarily conserved Toll-like receptor protein family.
The second paper, from Marco Colonna of Basel Institute for Immunology, Switzerland, and colleagues, demonstrates a critical function of another protein, TREM-1, in acute inflammatory responses to bacteria. TREM-1 seems to amplify the inflammatory responses triggered by bacterial and fungal infections — implicating it as a potential therapeutic target for septic shock.
A related News Feature examines the rush of recent discoveries that have propelled Toll-like receptors and innate immunity to the forefront of immunological research.
CONTACT:
Alan Aderem tel +1 206 732 1203, e-mail aderem@systemsbiology.org
Marco Colonna tel +41 61 605 1393, e-mail colonna@bii.ch
[4101049] EARTH: MEGABLOBS MIX UP MANTLE (pp1049-1056; N&V)
Large blobs contribute to ebb and flow in the Earth’s mantle, Alessandro M. Forte of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and Jerry Mitrovica, of the University of Toronto, Canada, report in this week’s Nature. Combining a wide range of geophysical observations with mineral physics data, the duo develop a model of global mantle flow and structure. They show that large-scale heterogeneity in the composition of the deep mantle may provide clues about the long-term evolution of the Earth.
Forte and Mitrovica verify that the whole mantle appears to be involved in a single convective system that is driven primarily by thermal anomalies. In addition, they find evidence of ‘megablobs’ within the lower mantle. The magnitude of the density variations is sufficient to lead to the so-called ‘doming’ mode of convection, in which large blobs of compositionally distinct mantle move up and down every so often. This finding is dynamically at odds with recent proposals of a deep mantle that is convectively isolated from the rest of the mantle.
In an accompanying News and Views article, Michael Manga, of the University of Oregon, discusses the background and implications of this work.
CONTACT:
Alessandro Forte tel +1 519 661 3188, e-mail aforte@uwo.ca
Michael Manga tel +1 541 346 5574, e-mail manga@newberry.uoregon.edu
[4101084] RELICS: FEATHERED FRIEND SPREAD-EAGLED (pp1084–1088)
Fossils of ‘feathered’ dinosaurs that promise to shed light on the origin of birds are becoming more common but, like most fossil skeletons, these dinosaurs are rarely complete, and the bones are often fragmentary and disarticulated.
This makes the feathered dinosaur described this week by Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and colleagues all the more special. The 126–147-million-year-old Chinese fossil is a complete skeleton preserved spread-eagled on a slab, allowing the examination of feather-like filaments over the body in unprecedented detail.
CONTACT:
Mark A. Norell tel +1 212 769 5804, email norell@amnh.org
[4101088] COVER: EUROPEAN BEEF IMPORTED FROM NEAR EAST (pp1088–1091)
Molecular biology meets archaeology in a study on p1088 that sets out to answer an age-old question: were European cattle domesticated in situ from their wild progenitor, the aurochs (Bos primigenius), or were they exotic foreign imports?
The answer seems to be the latter, according to Daniel G. Bradley of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and colleagues, whose examination of DNA from 392 extant animals from Europe, Africa and the Near East — together with DNA from 4 English fossils — shows that the DNA of European cattle has its roots in the Near East.
CONTACT:
Daniel G. Bradley tel +353 1 608 1088, email dbradley@tcd.ie
[4101073] CLIMATE: IN DEEP-WATER (pp1073-1077)
The North Atlantic circulation in the last interglacial period could serve as an analogue of future ocean dynamics in this region, in a climate warmed by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, Claude Hillaire-Marcel of the University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada, and his co-workers show in this week’s issue of Nature.
At present, two distinct water masses prevail in the abyssal Atlantic Ocean, which have sunk to their depths in the Nordic seas and the Labrador Sea, respectively. But according to model simulations, in a warmer future deep water formation in the Labrador Sea could stop. During the last interglacial period, which was about 2 °C warmer than today, no deep water formed in the Labrador Sea, Hillaire-Marcel’s team report.
The researchers use foraminifera — small organisms living in the sediment and in the water column — from sediment cores in the deep Labrador to reconstruct the past structure of the water column. Their work shows a single uniform water mass below the surface layer, originating from the Nordic seas, rather than two layers from different sources as today.
CONTACT:
Claude Hillaire-Marcel (currently in France) tel +33 442 97 15 22, e-mail chenv@uqam.ca
Jean-Claude Mareschal (co-author) tel +1 514 987 4080, e-mail jcm@olympus.geotop.uqam.ca
[4101048] …AND FINALLY: BEE KEEPING TIME (p1048)
Would bees’ body clocks be upset if their lives involved jet travel? Like us, honeybees learn to rest and find food at set times, but unlike us, they can swiftly ‘unlearn’ certain rhythmic behaviours if they need to and still function at top form, Guy Bloch and Gene E. Robinson of the University of Illinois, Urbana, report in a Brief Communication this week.
The researchers find that in hives with a severe staff shortage of young nurse bees to look after the hive’s larvae, older honeybees can revert from foraging, which is closely synchronized with their internal circadian clocks, to resume round-the-clock nursing, which — as any parent knows — is an arrhythmic activity.
“Our findings may have wider implications, given the conservation of some molecular components of biological clocks and of sleep regulation,” Bloch and Robinson conclude.
CONTACT:
Guy Bloch tel +1 217 333 2910, e-mail guybloch@life.uiuc.edu
Nature Publishing Group Reference
DNA Current Events and DNA News RSSInsect Resistance to Bt Crops can be Predicted, Monitored, and Managed
Since 1996, crop plants genetically modified to produce bacterial proteins that are toxic to certain insects, yet safe for people, have been planted on more than 200 million hectares worldwide.
Possible Link Studied Between Childhood Abuse and Early Cellular Aging
Children who suffer physical or emotional abuse may be faced with accelerated cellular aging as adults, according to new research from Butler Hospital and Brown University.
Biologists discover bacterial defense mechanism against aggressive oxygen
Bacteria possess an ingenious mechanism for preventing oxygen from harming the building blocks of the cell.
Just like old times: Generating RNA molecules in water
A key question in the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors.
Gene mismatch influences success of bone marrow transplants
A commonly inherited gene deletion can increase the likelihood of immune complications following bone marrow transplantation, an international team of researchers reports in the November 22 advance online issue of Nature Genetics.
Scientists at UA, collaborating institutions decode maize genome
Scientists from the University of Arizona led by Arizona Genomics Institute director Rod A. Wing and from collaborating institutions have deciphered the complete genetic code of the maize plant for the first time.
Ancestry attracts, but love is blind
People preferentially marry those with similar ancestry, but their decisions are not necessarily based on hair, eye or skin colour.
Scientists unlock clues for tailoring corn plant for food, energy needs
Scientists have long known that the offspring of two inbred strains tend to be superior to both their parents. Now, a team of researchers including a University of Florida geneticist has discovered clues to why that might be the case for one of the most important crops in the world: corn.
Cigarettes Harbor Many Bacteria Harmful to Human Health
Cigarettes are "widely contaminated" with bacteria, including some known to cause disease in people, concludes a new international study conducted by a University of Maryland environmental health researcher and microbial ecologists at the Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France.
Technique finds gene regulatory sites without knowledge of regulators
A new statistical technique developed by researchers at the University of Illinois allows scientists to scan a genome for specific gene-regulatory regions without requiring prior knowledge of the relevant transcription factors.
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The Stuff of Life: A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA by Mark Schultz (Author), Zander Cannon (Illustrator), Kevin Cannon (Illustrator) The Stuff of Life gives readers a complete introduction to the history of genetics that's as easy to understand as it is entertaining to read. |
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Discovery Exclusive DNA Explorer Kit by DISCOVERY CHANNEL Explore one of the newest frontiers in science - DNA mapping. From science labs to courtrooms, few discoveries are as exciting as the world of DNA. With this deluxe, first-of-its-kind kit, you can extract, view and map real DNA yourself. Ideal for budding forensic-scientists or secret agents, the working lab and tools are just like the real thing. Plus, you |
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