In deciding how to judge the impact of research, evaluators must take into account the effects of emphasizing particular measures — and be open about their methods.
doi: 10.1038/502271a
Care must be taken not to raise unrealistic expectations for RTS,S malaria vaccine.
doi: 10.1038/502271b
A look into the past frames our attempts to find extraterrestrial intelligence.
doi: 10.1038/502272a
Experiments suffer from lack of lab materials and staff during US government shutdown.
doi: 10.1038/502279a
Prize proves that theorists can measure up to experimenters.
doi: 10.1038/502280a
Social scientists want to examine how climate panel’s internal dynamics affect outcomes.
doi: 10.1038/502281a
Construction delays force rethink of research programme, but fusion target still on track.
doi: 10.1038/502282a
Government faces obstacles to mining medical records.
doi: 10.1038/502283a
But critics say mitochondrial replacement carries safety and ethical concerns.
doi: 10.1038/502284a
Evaluating research output and judging which work to fund is getting harder.
doi: 10.1038/502287a
Many governments are assessing the quality of university research, much to the dismay of some researchers.
doi: 10.1038/502288a
Publishing in the most prestigious journals can open doors, but their cachet is under attack.
doi: 10.1038/502291a
がんゲノムの解析は、1つの特定の疾患という枠を越えたところに移りつつあり、今や複数種の腫瘍の遺伝学的、エピジェネティクス的な特徴の比較が行われている。二人の研究者が、このような研究からはがんのどのような生物学的性質が分かるのか、またそれによって臨床治療の実践がどのような方向に向かうと予想されるのかを論じている。
doi: 10.1038/502306a
周波数コムと呼ばれるレーザーは、試料から分子スペクトルを数マイクロ秒の内に高い空間分解能で発生させるのに使われてきた。こうした性能が、リアルタイムでの顕微鏡観察の新たな展望につながっていく。
doi: 10.1038/502307a
細胞の幹細胞状態への再プログラム化が、遺伝的操作を施したマウスの組織で達成された。この結果は、将来の再生医学では、生体内で組織の運命を操作できるようになる可能性を示唆している。
doi: 10.1038/nature12559
新たに行われた観測から、極度に明るい超新星の一部は、質量が非常に大きい星の核爆発ではないと考えられるようになった。これらは、通常の質量の星で起こる事象であって、中心部から供給される強力な磁気エネルギーによって輝いているらしい。
doi: 10.1038/502310a
リソソームは、細胞内の主要な分解区画だが、細胞死経路にも関わっている。既存の薬剤を使った研究で、リソソームはがん細胞を選択的に破壊するための優れた薬理学的標的となることが分かった。
doi: 10.1038/nature12692
粒子の細胞への結合を制御する方法を探すことは、生物医学研究における新分野につながる可能性がある。そういうわけで、粒子と細胞との相互作用の方向性を誘導する方法が見つかったことは、大きな関心を集めている。
doi: 10.1038/502313a
多発性硬化症では神経軸索を囲むミエリン鞘に損傷が生じるが、以前からパーキンソン病の治療薬として使われている薬剤がこのような損傷の修復を誘導することが分かった。この知見は、多発性硬化症に対する治療薬開発の新しい方向性を示している。
doi: 10.1038/nature12694
A checklist of criteria to determine the readiness of high-throughput ‘omics’-based tests for guiding patient therapy in clinical trials is discussed; the checklist, developed by the US National Cancer Institute in collaboration with additional scientists with relevant expertise, provides a framework to evaluate the strength of evidence for a test and outlines practical issues to consider before using the test in a clinical setting, with an aim to avoid premature advancement of omics-based tests in clinical trials.
doi: 10.1038/nature12564
In Earth’s mantle, the shape change of olivine grains depending on temperature and the presence of melt can result in the development of olivine crystallographic preferred orientation during diffusion creep, meaning that the process may be the principal mechanism of mantle flow.
doi: 10.1038/nature12570
Multiple sclerosis is associated with a deficiency in generation of mature oligodendroctyes; an image-based screen for oligodendrocyte differentiation inducers identified the compound benztropine, which enhances remyelination acting through muscarinic receptors and decreases clinical severity in a multiple sclerosis model system.
doi: 10.1038/nature12647
As part of The Cancer Genome Atlas Pan-Cancer effort, data analysis for point mutations and small indels from 3,281 tumours and 12 tumour types is presented; among the findings are 127 significantly mutated genes from cellular processes with both established and emerging links in cancer, and an indication that the number of driver mutations required for oncogenesis is relatively small.
doi: 10.1038/nature12634
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) have been created in vivo by reprogramming mouse somatic cells with Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc; these cells have totipotent features that are missing from in vitro created iPS cells or embryonic stem cells.
doi: 10.1038/nature12586
Observations of two slow-to-fade super-luminous supernovae are reported; both show relatively fast rise times and blue colours, which are incompatible with pair-instability models.
doi: 10.1038/nature12569
A time-resolved, continuous parity measurement of two superconducting qubits in a three-dimensional circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture is reported; by further implementing feedback control, entanglement is generated ‘on demand’.
doi: 10.1038/nature12513
A new multiplex technique of coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectro-imaging with two laser frequency combs is shown to record molecular spectra of broad bandwidth on a microsecond scale.
doi: 10.1038/nature12607
Amines at typical atmospheric concentrations of a only few molecules per trillion air molecules combine with sulphuric acid to form highly stable aerosol particles at rates similar to those observed in the lower atmosphere.
doi: 10.1038/nature12663
Cambrian great appendage arthropods had heads that bore a claw-like appendage pair; neuroanatomical and phylogenetic analysis of a well-preserved Alalcomenaeus fossil reveals the relationship of great appendage arthropods to Chelicerata.
doi: 10.1038/nature12520
ESP22, a new pheromone produced by juvenile mice before puberty and released through the tears, activates neurons in the vomeronasal organ and inhibits mating behaviour in adult males towards animals expressing this signal.
doi: 10.1038/nature12579
CaMKII is known to be pathologically activated in heart failure and arrhythmias; here it is shown that glucose-induced CaMKII activation via O-linked glycosylation might contribute to cardiac pathology in diabetes.
doi: 10.1038/nature12537
Exploration of the interacting effect of statin exposure and genetic variation on gene expression identifies a cis-eQTL that is differentially associated with expression of the GATM gene, which encodes a rate-limiting enzyme involved in creatine synthesis, and that is associated with incidence of statin-induced myopathy, the major adverse effect of statin treatment.
doi: 10.1038/nature12508
Interstrand crosslink (ICL) repair involves proteins whose mutation results in the disorder Fanconi anaemia: here gene knockdown studies in mice show that the absence of HELQ, a protein previously implicated in ICL repair, compromises germ cell development and results in tumour predisposition due to defective recombination at damaged replication forks.
doi: 10.1038/nature12565
A novel high-throughput sequencing kinetics approach is used to measure functional binding of the apparently nonspecific RNA-binding protein C5 to all possible sequence variants in its substrate binding site; C5 binds different substrate variants with affinities varying widely, and with a similar affinity distribution to that of highly specific nucleic-acid-binding proteins, but it does not bind its physiological RNA targets with the highest affinity.
doi: 10.1038/nature12543
This paper demonstrates that the mechanism of break-induced replication (BIR) is significantly different from S-phase replication, as it proceeds via a migrating bubble driven by Pif1 helicase, results in conservative inheritance of newly synthesized DNA, and is inherently mutagenic.
doi: 10.1038/nature12584
This paper demonstrates that Pif1 helicase works with polymerase d to promote DNA synthesis through a migrating D-loop, a mechanism used to copy tens of kilobases during repair of chromosome breaks by break-induced replication (BIR).
doi: 10.1038/nature12585
