Anatomy articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Toll receptors trigger immune responses through adaptor proteins and kinase enzymes. Structural studies reveal that hierarchical assembly of these proteins into a helical tower initiates downstream signalling events.

    • Steven A. Wasserman

  • News & Views |

    To form new blood vessels, the endothelial tip cells of two existing vessels come together by the process of anastomosis. But how do they find each other? Macrophages seem to provide a bridge and mediate their union.

    • Thomas Schmidt
    •  & Peter Carmeliet

  • Editorial |

    Rats turn out to be surprisingly useful for research on cognition. But if the goal is to understand the human brain and its many disorders, then primate studies remain essential.

  • News Feature |

    Studying primates is the only way to understand human cognition — or so neuroscientists thought. But there may be much to learn from rats and mice, finds Alison Abbott.

    • Alison Abbott

  • Letter |

    Here, artificial proteins are described that mimic the molecular architecture of titin — a protein that helps to govern the passive elastic properties of muscle. The new artificial proteins combine structured and unstructured domains, and can be photochemically crosslinked into a solid biomaterial that is resilient at low strains and extensible and tough at high strains. This provides an example of tailoring the macroscopic properties of a material through engineering at the single-molecule level.

    • Shanshan Lv
    • , Daniel M. Dudek
    •  & Hongbin Li

  • News & Views |

    An elastic polymer has been made whose molecular structure mimics that of titin, a protein found in muscle. The resulting material is tough, stretchy and dissipates energy — just like muscle itself.

    • Elliot L. Chaikof

  • News & Views |

    Most insulin-secreting pancreatic β-cells are irreplaceably lost in type 1 diabetes. In a mouse model, pancreatic α-cells seem to sacrifice their identity to replenish the low stock of β-cells1. Two experts discuss what this means for understanding the basic cell biology involved and its relevance to treating diabetes.boxed-text

    • Kenneth S. Zaret
    •  & Morris F. White

  • Letter |

    One of the roles of the human gut microbiota is to break down nutrients using bacterial enzymes that are lacking from the human genome. It is now shown that the gut microbiota of Japanese, but not American, individuals contains porphyranases, enzymes that digest sulphated polysaccharides which are present in the marine environment only. These findings indicate that diet can select for gene content of the human microbiota.

    • Jan-Hendrik Hehemann
    • , Gaëlle Correc
    •  & Gurvan Michel

  • News & Views |

    Without the trillions of microbes that inhabit our gut, we can't fully benefit from the components of our diet. But cultural differences in diet may, in part, dictate what food our gut microbiota can digest.

    • Justin L. Sonnenburg

  • Article |

    In the pancreas, insulin-producing β-cells are long-lived and generally replicate seldom. They can do so, however, after increased metabolic demand or after injury. Here, a new transgenic model is developed in which β-cells are nearly completely ablated in mice. If given insulin, these mice survive, and grow new β-cells. Lineage-tracing shows that these new β-cells come from α-cells, revealing a previously disregarded degree of pancreatic cell plasticity.

    • Fabrizio Thorel
    • , Virginie Népote
    •  & Pedro L. Herrera

  • News & Views |

    Metabolic disorders such as obesity are characterized by long-term, low-grade inflammation. Under certain conditions, the resident microorganisms of the gut might contribute to this inflammation, resulting in disease.

    • Ping Li
    •  & Gökhan S. Hotamisligil

  • News & Views |

    A neuron can receive thousands of inputs that, together, tell it when to fire. New techniques can image the activity of many inputs, and shed light on how single neurons perform computations in response.

    • Nicholas J. Priebe
    •  & David Ferster

  • Article |

    Many sensory neurons in the mammalian cortex are tuned to specific stimulus features — for example, some fire only when horizontal bars move from top to bottom in the visual field. But it has been unclear whether such tuning is encoded in a neuron's inputs, or whether the neuron itself computes its response. Here, a new technique for visualizing and mapping sensory inputs to the dendrites of neurons in the mouse visual cortex has shown that each neuron makes its own 'decision' as to the orientation preference of its output.

    • Hongbo Jia
    • , Nathalie L. Rochefort
    •  & Arthur Konnerth

  • Letter |

    Here, a new type of innate effector leukocyte cell — the nuocyte — is described and characterized. It is shown that interleukin (IL)25 and IL33 drive the expansion of the nuocyte population, that these cells secrete IL13, and that they are required for protection against helminth infection.

    • Daniel R. Neill
    • , See Heng Wong
    •  & Andrew N. J. McKenzie

  • Article |

    In the mammalian brain, the subventricular zone (SVZ) produces neural progenitor cells that migrate into the cortex to populate the upper layers. In humans this region is massively expanded, producing an outer SVZ (OSVZ). Here, live-cell imaging of developing human tissue was used to show that the OSVZ has similar characteristics to the SVZ, with progenitor cells proliferating in a way that depends on the Notch protein. The findings have implications for our understanding of how the complex human brain evolved.

    • David V. Hansen
    • , Jan H. Lui
    •  & Arnold R. Kriegstein

  • Letter |

    Zebrafish are able to replace lost heart muscle efficiently, and are used as a model to understand why natural heart regeneration — after a heart attack, for instance — is blocked in mammals. Here, and in an accompanying paper, genetic fate-mapping approaches reveal which cell population contributes prominently to cardiac muscle regeneration after an injury approximating myocardial infarction. The results show that cardiac muscle regenerates through activation and expansion of existing cardiomyocytes, without involving a stem-cell population.

    • Chris Jopling
    • , Eduard Sleep
    •  & Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte

  • Letter |

    Although explored in the rodent, the relationship between single neuron activity, oscillations and behavioural learning is unknown in humans. Here, successful memory formation in humans was predicted by the coordination of spike timing relative to the local theta oscillation. These data provide a direct connection between the behavioural modulation of oscillations and plasticity within specific circuits.

    • Ueli Rutishauser
    • , Ian B. Ross
    •  & Erin M. Schuman

  • Article |

    A new mouse model is developed in which haematopoietic malignancies are caused by genetic changes in the microenvironment of blood cells. Deletion in bone progenitor cells of Dicer1, a gene involved in microRNA processing, leads to a myelodysplastic syndrome-like phenotype which can progress to leukaemia. Deregulation of Sbds, which is mutated in human Schwachman–Bodian–Diamond syndrome, may be involved in this process.

    • Marc H. G. P. Raaijmakers
    • , Siddhartha Mukherjee
    •  & David. T. Scadden

  • Letter |

    In multicellular organisms, apoptotic cells are removed from tissues by phagocytes, which recognize and engulf the dying cells. The molecular mechanisms underlying the subsequent degradation of the cells have been unclear. Here, two evolutionarily conserved genes have been identified that are required for such processing in Caenorhabditis elegans and mammals. An understanding of these events could lead to new treatments for diseases associated with poor engulfment and destruction of dying cells.

    • Jason M. Kinchen
    •  & Kodi S. Ravichandran

  • Letter |

    A genome-wide RNA interference screen to systematically test the genetic basis for formation and function of the Drosophila muscle is described. A role in muscle for 2,785 genes is identified; many of these genes are phylogenetically conserved.

    • Frank Schnorrer
    • , Cornelia Schönbauer
    •  & Barry J. Dickson

  • Article |

    In mammals, embryos are considered to be sexually indifferent until the action of a sex-determining gene initiates gonadal differentiation. Here it is demonstrated that this situation is different for birds. Using rare, naturally occurring chimaeric chickens where one side of the animal appears male and the other female, it is shown that avian somatic cells possess an inherent sex identity and that, in birds, sexual differentiation is cell autonomous.

    • D. Zhao
    • , D. McBride
    •  & M. Clinton

  • News |

    Immune cells seem to spark recurrent prostate cancer in mice.

    • Brian Vastag

  • News & Views |

    Mosquitoes' odorant receptors help the insects to find humans and, inadvertently, to transmit malaria. The identification of the odorants that bind to these receptors opens up ways of reducing mosquito biting.

    • Walter S. Leal

  • Letter |

    The brain's capacity to respond to instructive capacity underlies behavioural learning, but how instructive experience acts on the juvenile brain, a period in which learning is often enhanced, remains unknown. Here, two-photon in vivo imaging is used to study the brains of zebra finches as they learn to sing. The results indicate that behavioural learning results when instructive experience is able to rapidly stabilize and strengthen synapses on the sensorimotor neurons that control the learned behaviour.

    • Todd F. Roberts
    • , Katherine A. Tschida
    •  & Richard Mooney

  • News & Views |

    The production of intestinal cells in a worm embryo is regulated by a network of transcription factors. Studies of these networks in mutant worms provide evidence for stochastic effects in gene expression.

    • Adrian Streit
    •  & Ralf J. Sommer

  • News |

    Some argue that tumour cells obtained directly from patients are the best way to study cancer genomics.

    • Brendan Borrell

  • Article |

    Pancreatic β-cells release insulin, which controls energy homeostasis in vertebrates, and its lack causes diabetes mellitus. The transcription factor neurogenin 3 (Neurog3) initiates differentiation of β-cells and other islet cell types from pancreatic endoderm; here, the transcription factor Rfx6 is shown to direct islet cell differentiation downstream of Neurog3 in mice and humans. This may be useful in efforts to generate β-cells for patients with diabetes.

    • Stuart B. Smith
    • , Hui-Qi Qu
    •  & Michael S. German

  • Books & Arts |

    Steve Silberman enjoys a moving account that probes racial and ethical issues in medicine through the story of the young mother whose death from cancer led to the first immortal cell line.

    • Steve Silberman

  • Editorial |

    • Deepa Nath
    • , Ritu Dhand
    •  & Angela K. Eggleston

  • Letter |

    Animals use the Earth's magnetic field for orientation but the biophysical basis of this is unclear. The light-dependent magnetic sense of Drosophila melanogaster was recently shown to be mediated by the cryptochrome (Cry) photoreceptor; here, using a transgenic approach, the type 1 and 2 Cry of the monarch butterfly are shown to both function in the magnetoreception system of Drosophila, and probably use an unconventional photochemical mechanism.

    • Robert J. Gegear
    • , Lauren E. Foley
    •  & Steven M. Reppert

  • Letter |

    The extent of epigenetic reprogramming in mammalian primordial germ cells (PGCs) and in early embryos, and its molecular mechanisms, are poorly understood. DNA methylation profiling in PGCs now reveals a genome–wide erasure of methylation, with female PGCs being less methylated than male ones. A deficiency of the cytidine deaminase AID interferes with the genome–wide erasure of DNA methylation, indicating that AID has a critical function in epigenetic reprogramming.

    • Christian Popp
    • , Wendy Dean
    •  & Wolf Reik

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