Health sciences articles within Nature

Featured

  • News |

    Experts question claims that malaria and osteonecrosis contributed to Pharaoh's decline.

    • Declan Butler

  • 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

  • Editorial |

    The time is ripe for Europe's scientists to lobby for community-wide infrastructure funding.

  • Opinion |

    HIV research in South Africa is world class. To halt the country's epidemic, scientists need to shift focus from global problems to priorities at home, say Salim Abdool Karim and Quarraisha Abdool Karim.

    • Salim S. Abdool Karim
    •  & Quarraisha Abdool Karim

  • News & Views |

    DNA is particularly well preserved in hair — enabling the genome of a human to be sequenced, and his ancestry and appearance to be determined, from 4,000-year-old remains.

    • David M. Lambert
    •  & Leon Huynen

  • News & Views |

    Chronic drug use can lead to addiction, which is initiated by specific brain circuits. The mystery of how one class of drugs, the benzodiazepines, affects activity in this circuitry has finally been solved.

    • Arthur C. Riegel
    •  & Peter W. Kalivas

  • News & Views |

    Defects in mitochondria are implicated in Parkinson's disease. Study of a quality-control pathway involving the proteins PINK1 and Parkin provides further clues about the mechanism involved.

    • Asa Abeliovich

  • Article |

    To survive and evade host responses, malaria parasites export several hundred proteins into the host cell on infection. A feature of these proteins is a conserved, pentameric motif that is cleaved by an unknown protease before export. This is one of two independent studies revealing the identity of the protease as plasmepsin V, an aspartic acid protease located in the endoplasmic reticulum. This enzyme is essential for parasite viability and is an attractive candidate for drug development.

    • Ilaria Russo
    • , Shalon Babbitt
    •  & Daniel E. Goldberg

  • Letter |

    Recently, numerous single nucleotide polymorphisms have been identified as being associated with obesity, but these loci together account for only a small fraction of the known heritable component. Here, an association is reported between rare deletions of at least 593 kilobases at 16p11.2 and a highly penetrant form of obesity. The strategy used of combining study of extreme phenotypes with targeted follow-up is promising for identifying missing heritability in obesity.

    • R. G. Walters
    • , S. Jacquemont
    •  & J. S. Beckmann

  • 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

  • Career Brief |

    Fellowship aims to boost collaborative research at European academic institutions and industrial labs.

  • News & Views |

    Embryonic stem cells can create copies of themselves, but can also mature into almost any type of cell in the body. Tiny gene regulators called microRNAs are now shown to have a role in directing these properties.

    • Frank J. Slack

  • Column |

    Innovation policies are more likely to be successful if they leverage existing capabilities, argues Daniel Sarewitz.

    • Daniel Sarewitz

  • Article |

    Insect vectors of diseases locate their animal hosts through olfaction via largely unknown molecular processes. Here the 'empty neuron' system of genetically engineered Drosophila is used to assign specific odorants to the entire repertoire of olfactory receptors of the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae. The results illuminate ecological and neurobiological differences between mosquitoes and fruitflies and provide new potential molecular targets to boost the struggle against insect–borne diseases.

    • Allison F. Carey
    • , Guirong Wang
    •  & John R. Carlson

  • Article |

    The integrase protein of retroviruses such as HIV-1 catalyses insertion of the viral genome into that of the host. Here, the long-awaited structure of the full-length integrase complex is predicted, revealing not only details of the biochemistry of the integration reaction, but also the means by which current inhibitors affect this process.

    • Stephen Hare
    • , Saumya Shree Gupta
    •  & Peter Cherepanov

  • Editorial |

    The reporting of candidate biomarkers for disease must be rigorous to drive translational research.

  • Editorial |

    By opening up its database of potential malaria drugs, GlaxoSmithKline has blazed a path that other pharmaceutical companies should follow.

  • Editorial |

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

  • News & Views |

    Damaged lysosomes, the principal degradative organelles, can kill a cell. A stress-induced protein controls lysosome stability, providing a potential target to treat lysosome-related diseases and cancer.

    • Ibolya Horváth
    •  & László Vígh

  • News Feature |

    Alan Ashworth took a cancer drug from Petri dish to patients in near record speed. Daniel Cressey meets a biologist who is evangelical about translational research.

    • Daniel Cressey

  • News |

    Fight against tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS under threat from success.

    • Declan Butler

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