Biological sciences articles within Nature

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Biologists have assumed that natural selection shapes larger patterns of evolution through interactions such as competition and predation. These patterns may instead be determined by rare, stochastic speciation.

    • Michael J. Benton

  • Books & Arts |

    The director of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, calls for a revolution in personalized medicine. Such advances should be shared beyond the developed world, says Abdallah S. Daar.

    • Abdallah S. Daar

  • Opinion |

    People's grasp of scientific debates can improve if communicators build on the fact that cultural values influence what and whom we believe, says Dan Kahan.

    • Dan Kahan

  • Authors |

    Testosterone's 'bad guy' image is rooted in folklore, not fact.

  • News Feature |

    Can engineering approaches tame the complexity of living systems? Roberta Kwok explores five challenges for the field and how they might be resolved.

    • Roberta Kwok

  • News |

    AAAS president Peter Agre talks to Nature about his recent visits to Cuba and North Korea.

    • David Cyranoski

  • Letter |

    The amino acid antiporter AdiC is important for the survival of enteric bacteria such as Escherichia coli in extremely acid environments. Although the structure of substrate-free AdiC is known, how the substrate (arginine or agmatine) is recognized and transported by AdiC remains unclear. The crystal structure of an E. coli AdiC variant bound to arginine is now reported and analysed.

    • Xiang Gao
    • , Lijun Zhou
    •  & Yigong Shi

  • Letter |

    Sperm can increase their swimming velocity and gain a competitive advantage over sperm from another male by forming cooperative groups, such that selection should favour cooperation of the most closely related sperm. Sperm of deer mice are now shown to aggregate more often with conspecific than heterospecific sperm, in accordance with this theory, whereas in a monogamous species lacking sperm competition, sperm indiscriminately group with unrelated conspecific sperm.

    • Heidi S. Fisher
    •  & Hopi E. Hoekstra

  • Letter |

    Rodents have an orientation map of their surroundings, produced and updated by a network of neurons in the entorhinal cortex known as 'grid cells'. However, it is currently unknown whether humans encode their location in a similar manner. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans, a macroscopic signal representing a subject's position in a virtual reality environment is now detected that meets the criteria for defining grid-cell encoding.

    • Christian F. Doeller
    • , Caswell Barry
    •  & Neil Burgess

  • Letter |

    Progenitor cells sustain the capacity of self-renewing tissues for proliferation while suppressing cell cycle exit and terminal differentiation. DNA methylation is one potential epigenetic mechanism for the cellular memory needed to preserve the somatic progenitor state through cell divisions. The DNA methyltransferase 1 and other regulators of DNA methylation are now shown to be essential for epidermal progenitor cell function.

    • George L. Sen
    • , Jason A. Reuter
    •  & Paul A. Khavari

  • Letter |

    High mutation rates in the influenza A virus facilitate the generation of viral escape mutants, rendering vaccines and drugs potentially ineffective, but targeting host cell determinants could prevent viral escape. Here, 287 human host cell genes influencing influenza A virus replication are found using a genome-wide RNA interference screen. An independent assay is then used to investigate overlap between genes necessary for different viral strains.

    • Alexander Karlas
    • , Nikolaus Machuy
    •  & Thomas F. Meyer

  • Letter |

    Much of the mammalian genome is derived from retroelements, a significant proportion of which are endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). ERVs are transcriptionally silenced during early embryogenesis by histone and DNA methylation, but the initiators of this process are largely unknown. Here, deletion of KAP1 is shown to lead to a marked upregulation of a range of ERVs in mouse embryonic stem cells and in early embryos.

    • Helen M. Rowe
    • , Johan Jakobsson
    •  & Didier Trono

  • Article |

    Form I Rubisco, one of the most abundant proteins in nature, catalyses the fixation of atmospheric CO2 in photosynthesis. The limited catalytic efficiency of Rubisco has sparked extensive efforts to re-engineer the enzyme to enhance agricultural productivity. To bring this goal closer, the formation of cyanobacterial form I Rubisco is now analysed by in vitro reconstitution and cryo-electron microscopy.

    • Cuimin Liu
    • , Anna L. Young
    •  & Manajit Hayer-Hartl

  • Letter |

    Rho is a general transcription termination factor in bacteria, but the mechanism by which it disrupts the RNA polymerase (RNAP) elongation complex is unknown. Here, Rho is shown to bind tightly to the RNAP throughout the transcription cycle, with the formation of the RNAP–Rho complex being crucial for termination. Furthermore, RNAP is proposed to have an active role in Rho termination through an allosteric mechanism.

    • Vitaly Epshtein
    • , Dipak Dutta
    •  & Evgeny Nudler

  • Letter |

    The involvement of astroglia in long-term potentiation (LTP) of synaptic transmission remains controversial. Clamping internal Ca2+ in individual astrocytes in the CA1 area of the hippocampus is now shown to block LTP induction at nearby excitatory synapses through an effect on the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor. This LTP blockade can be reversed by exogenous D-serine, normally released in a Ca2+-dependent manner from astrocytes.

    • Christian Henneberger
    • , Thomas Papouin
    •  & Dmitri A. Rusakov

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Soybean is an important crop plant, providing seed protein and oil and fixing atmospheric nitrogen through symbioses with soil-borne microorganisms. Using a whole-genome shotgun approach, its 1.1-gigabase genome is now sequenced and integrated with physical and high-density genetic maps to create a chromosome-scale draft sequence assembly.

    • Jeremy Schmutz
    • , Steven B. Cannon
    •  & Scott A. Jackson

  • Letter |

    Polycomb proteins have a key role in regulating the expression of genes essential for development, differentiation and maintenance of cell fates. Here, Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) is shown to form a complex with JARID2, a Jumonji domain protein. JARID2 is required for the binding of Polycomb proteins to target genes in embryonic stem cells as well as for the proper differentiation of ES cells.

    • Diego Pasini
    • , Paul A. C. Cloos
    •  & Kristian Helin

  • Letter |

    Phytochromes regulate numerous photoresponses in plants and microorganisms through their ability to photointerconvert between a red-light-absorbing, ground state (Pf) and a far-red-light-absorbing, photoactivated state (Pfr). The structures of several phytochromes as Pf have been determined previously; here, the three-dimensional solution structure of the bilin-binding domain as Pfr is described. The results shed light on the structural basis for photoconversion to the activated Pfr form.

    • Andrew T. Ulijasz
    • , Gabriel Cornilescu
    •  & Richard D. Vierstra

  • News & Views |

    Memory formation is known to occur at the level of synaptic contacts between neurons. It therefore comes as a surprise that another type of brain cell, the astrocyte, is also involved in establishing memory.

    • Mirko Santello
    •  & Andrea Volterra

  • News & Views |

    Chemical models of enzymes' active sites aid our understanding of biological reactions. Such a model of a reaction intermediate promises to advance our knowledge of the biochemistry of iron-containing haem enzymes.

    • Kenneth D. Karlin

  • News & Views |

    The key enzyme in photosynthesis, Rubisco, is a relic of a bygone age. The ability to assemble Rubisco in the test tube offers the prospect of genetically manipulating the enzyme to make it fit for the modern world.

    • R. John Ellis

  • News & Views |

    Parent birds commonly face the problem of distinguishing their own brood from foreign chicks. Learnt chick-recognition evolves only when parents do not mistakenly learn to reject their own young.

    • Rebecca Kilner

  • Letter |

    Little is known about the recent evolution of the Y chromosome because only the human Y chromosome has been fully sequenced. The sequencing of the male-specific region of the Y chromosome (MSY) in the chimpanzee and comparison between the MSYs of the two species now reveals that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content, indicating rapid evolution over the past 6 million years.

    • Jennifer F. Hughes
    • , Helen Skaletsky
    •  & David C. Page

  • Letter |

    Distinguishing self from non-self is a vital function for immune systems to repel invaders without inducing autoimmunity. One system, which protects bacteria and archaea from invasion by phage and plasmid DNA, involves clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) loci. Here, in Staphylococcus epidermidis, the mechanism of CRISPR self/non-self discrimination is defined.

    • Luciano A. Marraffini
    •  & Erik J. Sontheimer

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