Research articles

Generation of human induced pluripotent stem cells from patient fibroblasts containing ring chromosomes with large deletions reveals that reprogrammed cells lose the abnormal chromosome and duplicate the wild-type homologue through compensatory uniparental disomy, suggesting that cellular reprogramming may hold potential for ‘chromosome therapy’.

A study investigating the mechanisms underlying lateral inhibition and lineage plasticity in the mouse small intestine crypts in vivo finds that crypt cells maintain a permissive chromatin state upon which a transcription factor acts to determine lineage specification, and this is the basis of lateral inhibition.

Ecosystem mycorrhizal type is shown to have a stronger effect on soil carbon storage than temperature, precipitation, clay content and primary production; ecosystems dominated by ectomycorrhizal and ericoid mycorrhizal fungi contain 70% more soil carbon per unit nitrogen than do ecosystems dominated by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

Flow batteries, in which the electro-active components are held in fluid form external to the battery itself, are attractive as a potential means for regulating the output of intermittent renewable sources of electricity; an aqueous flow battery based on inexpensive commodity chemicals is now reported that also has the virtue of enabling further improvement of battery performance through organic chemical design.

Dark melanin pigment was detected in the fossilized skin of three distantly related marine reptiles (a leatherback turtle, mosasaur and ichthyosaur); benefits of thermoregulation and/or crypsis may have contributed to this melanisation, which therefore has implications for our understanding of how these animals may have lived.

A new method for identifying genetic loci that influence protein expression in budding yeast reveals considerable complexity in how genetic variation shapes the proteome.

This study provides a crystal structure of the Vif–CBF-β–CUL5–ELOB–ELOC complex, which shows that Vif mimics the action of SOCS2 to interact with CUL5 and ELOC.

UvrD acts in nucleotide excision repair by using its helicase/translocase activity to induce RNA polymerase backtracking, enabling repair enzymes to access DNA lesions.

Whole-genome analysis of the elephant shark, a cartilaginous fish, shows that it is the slowest evolving of all known vertebrates, lacks critical bone formation genes and has an unusual adaptive immune system.

Precision timing and multiwavelength observations of a millisecond pulsar in a triple system show that the gravitational interactions between the bodies are strong; this allows the mass of each body to be determined accurately and means that the triple system will provide precise tests of the strong equivalence principle of general relativity.

In the predominantly diploid yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, regulatory control of mating is separate from meiosis; here the related hemiascomycete yeast Candida lusitaniae is shown to have coordinated regulatory control of mating and meiosis, favouring the formation of haploids.

Large-scale genomic analysis of somatic point mutations in exomes from tumour–normal pairs across 21 cancer types identifies most known cancer genes in these tumour types as well as 33 genes not known to be significantly mutated, and down-sampling analysis indicates that larger sample sizes will reveal many more genes mutated at clinically important frequencies.

The transmission spectrum of the super-Earth exoplanet GJ 1214b is observed to be featureless at near-infrared wavelengths and its atmosphere must contain clouds to be consistent with the data.

The transmission spectrum of the Neptune-mass exoplanet GJ 436b is shown to be featureless, implying that the planet has either a hydrogen-poor atmosphere or a high cloud layer.

The change in global mean temperature in response to a change in external forcing is highly uncertain; here differences in the simulated strength of convective mixing between the lower and middle tropical troposphere are shown to explain about half of the variance in climate sensitivity, constraining the predicted equilibrium climate sensitivity to an increase of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius.