| | Reproducibility: Experimental mismatch in neural circuits
The finding that acute and chronic manipulations of the same neural circuit can produce different behavioural outcomes poses new questions about how best to analyse these circuits. | Tuberculosis: Autophagy is not the answer
The cellular process of autophagy has been proposed to help kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis. But although the autophagy gene Atg5 is key to host immunity, other autophagy genes do not affect the outcome of tuberculosis. | Regenerative biology: Innate immunity repairs gut lining
It emerges that innate immune cells called group 3 innate lymphoid cells signal directly to intestinal stem cells to promote the replacement of damaged epithelial cells lining the gut. | Cosmology: Rare isotopic insight into the Universe
Light isotopes of hydrogen and helium formed minutes after the Big Bang. The study of one of these primordial isotopes, helium-3, has now been proposed as a useful strategy for constraining the physics of the standard cosmological model. | Acute off-target effects of neural circuit manipulations
Transient manipulation of neural activity is widely used to probe the function of specific circuits, yet such targeted perturbations could also have indirect effects on downstream circuits that implement separate and independent functions; a study to test this reveals that transient perturbations of specific circuits in mammals and songbirds severely impair learned skills that recover spontaneously after permanent lesions of the same brain areas. | Phosphorylation and linear ubiquitin direct A20 inhibition of inflammation
The authors define molecular mechanisms by which distinct domains of the ubiquitin editing enzyme A20 contribute to the regulation of inflammation and cell death. | Repairing oxidized proteins in the bacterial envelope using respiratory chain electrons
The identification of an enzymatic system repairing proteins containing oxidized methionine in the bacterial cell envelope, a compartment particularly susceptible to oxidative damage by host defence mechanisms. | Radiative heat transfer in the extreme near field
Nanoscale radiative heat transfer between both dielectric and metal surfaces separated by gaps as small as two nanometres is characterized by large gap-dependent heat transfer enhancements that are accurately modelled by the theoretical framework of fluctuational electrodynamics and has important implications for technological design. | Neutrophils support lung colonization of metastasis-initiating breast cancer cells
Neutrophils are shown to have a role in driving the metastasis of breast cancer cells to the lung, with neutrophil-derived leukotrienes promoting metastatic initiation in the lung by expanding the sub-pool of cancer cells with high tumorigenic potential. | A mechanism for the suppression of homologous recombination in G1 cells
A mechanism for the repression of homologous recombination in G1, the stage of the cell cycle preceding replication, is determined; the critical aspects are the interaction between BRCA1 and PALB2–BRCA2, and suppression of DNA-end resection. | Self-shaping of oil droplets via the formation of intermediate rotator phases upon cooling
A mechanism for the repression of homologous recombination in G1, the stage of the cell cycle preceding replication, is determined; the critical aspects are the interaction between BRCA1 and PALB2–BRCA2, and suppression of DNA-end resection. | Unique role for ATG5 in neutrophil-mediated immunopathology during M. tuberculosis infection
Genetic engineering in mice reveals that autophagy is not an essential mechanism in myeloid cells for controlling Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection, and that autophagy factor ATG5 protects organisms by regulating neutrophil influx and tissue damage. | Interleukin-22 promotes intestinal-stem-cell-mediated epithelial regeneration
Innate lymphoid cells increase the growth of mouse intestinal organoids via IL-22 production; recombinant IL-22 promotes growth of both mouse and human organoids, and promotes mouse intestinal stem cell (ISC) expansion and ISC-driven organoid growth via a STAT3-dependent pathway and independently of Paneth cells; IL-22 treatment in vivo enhances the recovery of ISCs from intestinal injury. | | Undecidability of the spectral gap
The spectral gap problem—whether the Hamiltonian of a quantum many-body problem is gapped or gapless—is rigorously proved to be undecidable; there exists no algorithm to determine whether an arbitrary quantum many-body model is gapped or gapless, and there exist models for which the presence or absence of a spectral gap is independent of the axioms of mathematics.
Toby S. Cubitt, David Perez-Garcia, Michael M. Wolf | Immune homeostasis enforced by co-localized effector and regulatory T cells
Autoantigen-presenting dendritic cells are shown to interact with both effector and regulatory T cells, and effector-produced IL-2 activates the transcription factor STAT5 in regulatory T cells, which in turn upregulates suppressive molecules and prevents autoimmunity.
Zhiduo Liu, Michael Y. Gerner, Nicholas Van Panhuys et al. | Molecular structures of unbound and transcribing RNA polymerase III
RNA polymerase III (Pol III), the largest eukaryote polymerase yet characterized, transcribes structured small non-coding RNAs; here cryo-electron microscopy structures of budding yeast Pol III allow building of an atomic-level model of the complete 17-subunit complex, both unbound and while elongating RNA.
Niklas A. Hoffmann, Arjen J. Jakobi, María Moreno-Morcillo et al. | Signal integration by Ca2+ regulates intestinal stem-cell activity
Drosophila intestinal stem cells (ISCs) respond to changes in diet, particularly L-glutamate levels, by modulating Ca2+ signalling to adapt their proliferation rate; furthermore, Ca2+ is shown to be central to the response of ISCs to a wide range of dietary and stress stimuli.
Hansong Deng, Akos A. Gerencser, Heinrich Jasper | The histone chaperone CAF-1 safeguards somatic cell identity
RNA interference screens were used to identify chromatin-associated factors that impede reprogramming of somatic cells into iPS cells; suppression of the chromatin assembly factor CAF-1 enhances the generation of iPS cells by rendering chromatin more accessible to pluripotency transcription factors.
Sihem Cheloufi, Ulrich Elling, Barbara Hopfgartner et al. | | Scale dependence of rock friction at high work rate
In metre-sized rock specimens, rock friction starts to decrease at a much smaller work rate than in centimetre-sized rock specimens, thus demonstrating that rock friction is scale-dependent.
Futoshi Yamashita, Eiichi Fukuyama, Kazuo Mizoguchi et al. | Force generation by skeletal muscle is controlled by mechanosensing in myosin filaments
It is widely accepted that contraction of skeletal muscle and the heart involves structural changes in actin-containing thin filaments to allow binding of myosin motors from neighbouring thick filaments, thus driving filament sliding; here, X-ray diffraction of single skeletal muscle cells reveals that this thin-filament mechanism can regulate muscle contraction against low load, but high-load contraction requires a second permissive step involving a structural change in the thick filament.
Marco Linari, Elisabetta Brunello, Massimo Reconditi et al. | Disentangling type 2 diabetes and metformin treatment signatures in the human gut microbiota
Growing evidence from metagenome-wide association studies link multiple common disorders to microbial dysbiosis but effects of drug treatment are often not accounted for; here, the authors re-analyse two previous metagenomic studies of type 2 diabetes mellitus patients together with a novel cohort to determine the effects of the widely prescribed antidiabetic drug metformin and highlight the need to distinguish the effects of a disease from the effects of treatment on the gut microbiota.
Kristoffer Forslund, Falk Hildebrand, Trine Nielsen et al. | Sublimation in bright spots on (1) Ceres
The dwarf planet (1) Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt, is found to have localized bright areas on its surface; particularly interesting is a bright pit on the floor of the crater Occator that exhibits what is likely to be water ice sublimation, producing crater-bound haze clouds with a diurnal rhythm.
A. Nathues, M. Hoffmann, M. Schaefer et al. | Ammoniated phyllosilicates with a likely outer Solar System origin on (1) Ceres
Infrared spectra of (1) Ceres acquired at distances of 82,000 to 4,300 kilometres from the surface indicate widespread ammoniated phyllosilicates; the presence of ammonia suggests that material from the outer Solar System was incorporated into Ceres.
M. C. De Sanctis, E. Ammannito, A. Raponi et al. | Nanoscale intimacy in bifunctional catalysts for selective conversion of hydrocarbons
The conversion of hydrocarbons to produce high-quality diesel fuel can be catalysed by bifunctional materials that contain a metal site and an acid site; it has been assumed that these sites should be as close as possible in order to enhance catalysis, but it is now shown that having them too close together can be detrimental to selectivity.
Jovana Zečević, Gina Vanbutsele, Krijn P. de Jong et al. | An observational radiative constraint on hydrologic cycle intensification
The magnitude of global precipitation increase predicted by climate models has a large uncertainty that has been difficult to constrain, but much of the range in predictions is now shown to arise from shortcomings in the modelling of atmospheric absorption of shortwave radiation; if the radiative transfer algorithms controlling the absorption were more accurate, the model spread would narrow and the mean estimate could be about 40% lower.
Anthony M. DeAngelis, Xin Qu, Mark D. Zelinka et al. | The ontogeny of fairness in seven societies
An analysis of when children develop a sense of fairness (receiving less or more than a peer) is compared across seven different societies; aversion to receiving less emerges early in childhood in all societies, whereas aversion to receiving more emerges later in childhood and only in three of the seven societies studied.
P. R. Blake, K. McAuliffe, J. Corbit et al. | FGF signalling regulates bone growth through autophagy
During postnatal development in mice, the growth factor FGF18 induces autophagy in the chondrocyte cells of the growth plate to regulate the secretion of type II collagen, a process required for bone growth.
Laura Cinque, Alison Forrester, Rosa Bartolomeo et al. | Polarized endosome dynamics by spindle asymmetry during asymmetric cell division
Central spindle asymmetry, generated by the kinesin Klp10A and its antagonist Patronin, polarizes endosome motility and provides a mechanism for the asymmetric segregation of signalling endosomes observed in a variety of asymmetrically dividing cell types.
Emmanuel Derivery, Carole Seum, Alicia Daeden et al. | Replication stress activates DNA repair synthesis in mitosis
Common fragile sites (CFSs) are difficult-to-replicate regions of eukaryotic genomes that are sensitive to replication stress and that require resolution by the MUS81–EME1 endonuclease to re-initiate POLD3-dependent DNA synthesis in early mitosis; this study defines the specific pathway of events causing the CFS fragility phenotype.
Sheroy Minocherhomji, Songmin Ying, Victoria A. Bjerregaard et al. | Barcoding reveals complex clonal dynamics of de novo transformed human mammary cells
The first formal evidence of the shared and independent ability of basal cells and luminal pro-genitors isolated from normal human mammary tissue and transduced with a single oncogene to initiate tumorigeneses when introduced into mice.
Long V. Nguyen, Davide Pellacani, Sylvain Lefort et al. | | | | |
