1918 flu immunization

Kong et al studied whether it is possible to develop immunity to the 1918 flu virus, since this strain was unusually virulent. They immunized mice with plasmids encoding hemagglutinin. The mice were completely protected from live virus. (I didn't realize people werre experimenting with live 1918 flu virus, but apparently they are. This is done in BSL 3 facilities.)

How to referee papers

This article in Nature gives steps for how to train a student to referee a paper. Some of the suggestions are good, which is why I'm linking to it, but I was shocked by the three hour time frame. That seems far too short to do a careful review.

If honeybees go, what will pollinate our plants?

A chief pollinator in the US is the honeybee. However, hives have been decimated by the Varroa mite since the late 1980s. A recent study noted that pollinator diversity in Europe has decreased, and there are fears that this is also happening in the US. This article in Science summarizes the issues and stresses the need for additional types of pollinators.

Is it really chemistry?

This year's Nobel prize in chemistry for the crystal structure of RNA polymerase II (responsible for transcription) has generated some controversy. Apparently some people feel that the study was too biological and not really chemistry. See this Nature article for a few quotes. (Or check out this Science article to read about the actual science of the discovery.)

Translational control without proteins

Many bacterial mRNAs contain riboswitches. These are regions of secondary structure upstream of the translated region. They bind to metabolites, and the resulting structural change regulates gene expression, usually by affecting transcription termination or translation initiation. I just learned about these from a new article in Science, which describes two riboswitches that act in tandem to form a NOR gate.

It looks as though all the references for riboswitches are from 2004 onward, so these guys didn't exist back when I was modeling translation. This is yet another translational control mechanism that could lead to the nonlinear relationship between mRNA and protein levels. Note that riboswitches occur in bacteria: this isn't one of those fancy mechanisms that are limited to eukaryotes. Between ribozymes, riboswitches, and RNAi, the role of RNA has expanded greatly in the past 10-15 years since my college textbooks were written.

Experimental ecology

In a really nice ecological experiment, Gotelli and Ellison manipulated the ecosystem of invertebrates that live in small volumes of water that collect in the leaves of the pitcher plant. They changed the volume of the habitat (simulation of habitat loss) and the number of top predators (since often the first things to go when habitat is lost are the top predators). In this case, the top predators are dipteran (fly) larvae. The authors compare their results with various ecological models, but I haven't read that part in detail yet.

This article was also picked up by Science (short blurb) and Nature (longer review).

Ig Nobel awards

Of course it is also the time of year for the Ig Nobel prizes.
CNN article
official list with references
I admit to being rather interested in the physics award for why spaghetti fractures into more than two pieces, which was originally published in PRL.

ETA: Nature has written up one of the other prizes, for research on why woodpeckers don't get headaches.

Natural history museums - Past and present

Here's an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about natural history museums. I hadn't thought about this much, but the author's descriptions of the old exhibits' connection between science and art resonate with my memories of visiting the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History when I was little. Although poorly lit, the exhibits were awe inspiring. I tend not to be impressed by modern, brightly colored "Please Touch" exhibits (not to mention the number of germs they must be infested with).

RNAi

This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine is for RNAi: RNA interference. Double stranded RNA is used to silence genes. The double stranded RNA is cleaved into siRNAs (small interfering RNAs). The silencing mechanism involves additional cellular machinery that binds the siRNAs. The siRNAs then bind their target mRNA, and the mRNA is cleaved by the complex. See this nice Wiki article on the topic.

The Nobel laureates' paper appeared in Nature in 1998, so this is very recent work.