Los Premios Nobeles también se equivocan.......

Two prominent journals have retracted papers by Nobel laureate Linda Buck today because she was "unable to reproduce [the] key findings" of experiments done by her former postdoctoral researcher Zhihua Zou, according to a statement made by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), where Buck worked at the time of the publications.

These retractions, a 2006 Science paper and a 2005 Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) paper, are tied to a 2001 Nature paper that she retracted in 2008, due to the inability "to reproduce the reported findings" and "inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data," according to the retraction. Zou was the first author on all three papers and responsible for conducting the experiments.

The FHCRC is currently conducting an investigation into the issue, said Kristen Woodward, senior media relations manager, but no findings of misconduct have been made. John Dahlberg of the Office of Research Integrity declined to comment on the matter.

The paper in PNAS, which has been cited 61 times according to ISI, describes how smells from substances with similar molecular structures elicit "strikingly similar" neuronal patterns in the olfactory cortex of mice brains across individuals, supporting the presence of "olfactory maps" that follow "an underlying logic," according to the paper. The Science paper, cited 73 times, furthers the research and supports that mixed smells, such as chocolate and citrus, activate neurons in the olfactory cortex that chocolate or citrus do not when presented individually, which may explain why these mixtures tend to smell like completely different substances to humans.

Fortunately, the retractions will not have a large impact on the field, Donald Wilson, an olfactory researcher at New York University and Nathan Kline Institute, told The Scientist in an email. "The story of how cortical odor processing occurs doesn't change," he said. "Work in our own lab and others have now also shown the highly distributed, sparse nature of odor processing in the olfactory cortex, and the complex processes involved in dealing with odor mixtures, much as these two now retracted papers showed."

Zou was unavailable for comment, as his current location is unknown, according to FHCRC. After completing his post doctoral research with Buck at FHCRC in 2005, Zou took an assistant professor position at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. In November of 2008, however, Zou was laid off from the institution, along with 2,400 other UTMB staff members, after Hurricane Ike ripped the university apart that September, according to Raul Reyes, the director of media relations at the UTMB.

In 2008, Zou wrote in a statement provided by UTMB that he was "disappointed" by the Nature retraction, and denied any misconduct on his part. While Zou agreed to the Nature retraction, he "declined to sign" the Science retraction, as reported online today in Science. But "we have no information to suspect misconduct," Natasha Pinol, senior communications officer at the AAAS/Science Office of Public Programs, told The Scientist in an email.

In addition to the irreproducible results, the PNAS paper also contained "figures inconsistent with original data," according to the FHCRC statement. While the PNAS retraction is "not embargoed," according to Managing Editor Daniel Salsbury, the journal refused to share any information with The Scientist before deadline, noting that the retraction would appear online after 2:00 p.m. EDT this afternoon.

The research that won Buck the 2004 Nobel Prize, which she shared with olfactory researcher Richard Axel of Columbia University "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system," was unrelated to the research in the retracted papers.

Un nuevo caso de terapia génica

Transfusion independence and HMGA2 activation after gene therapy of human β-thalassaemia.

 

Disorders caused by abnormal [beta]-globin, such as

[beta]-thalassaemia, are the most prevalent inherited disorders

worldwide. For treatment, many patients are dependent on blood

transfusions; thus far the only cure has involved matched

transplantation of haematopoietic stem cells. Here it is shown that

lentiviral [beta]-globin gene transfer can be an effective substitute

for regular transfusions in a patient with severe [beta]-thalassaemia

 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7313/abs/nature09328.html

Nature, septiembre del 2010

Virus gigantes o giruses

DNA Viruses: The Really Big Ones (Giruses)

Annual Review of Microbiology

Vol. 64: 83-99 (Volume publication date October 2010)

First published online as a Review in Advance on May 12, 2010

James L. Van Etten,^1,2 Leslie C. Lane,¹ and David D. Dunigan^1,2

¹Department of Plant Pathology, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68583;

²Nebraska Center for Virology, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68583; email: jvanetten@unlnotes.unl.edu

 

Viruses with genomes greater than 300 kb and up to 1200 kb are being discovered with increasing frequency. These large viruses (often called giruses) can encode up to 900 proteins and also many tRNAs. Consequently, these viruses have more protein-encoding genes than many bacteria, and the concept of small particle/small genome that once defined viruses is no longer valid. Giruses infect bacteria and animals although most of the recently discovered ones infect protists. Thus, genome gigantism is not restricted to a specific host or phylogenetic clade. To date, most of the giruses are associated with aqueous environments. Many of these large viruses (phycodnaviruses and Mimiviruses) probably have a common evolutionary ancestor with the poxviruses, iridoviruses, asfarviruses, ascoviruses, and a recently discovered Marseillevirus. One issue that is perhaps not appreciated by the microbiology community is that large viruses, even ones classified in the same family, can differ significantly in morphology, lifestyle, and genome structure. This review focuses on some of these differences than on extensive details about individual viruses.

A bizarre, humped Carcharodontosauria (Theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of Spain

Carcharodontosaurs were the largest predatory dinosaurs, and their early evolutionary history seems to be more intricate than was previously thought. Until recently, carcharodontosaurs were restricted to a group of large theropods inhabiting the Late Cretaceous Gondwanan land masses^{1, 2}, but in the last few years Laurasian evidence^{3, 4, 5} has been causing a reevaluation of their initial diversification⁶. Here we describe an almost complete and exquisitely preserved skeleton of a medium-sized (roughly six metres long) theropod from the Lower Cretaceous series (Barremian stage) Konservat-Lagerstätte of Las Hoyas⁷ in Cuenca, Spain. Cladistic analysis supports the idea that the new taxon Concavenator corcovatus is a primitive member of Carcharodontosauria⁶, exhibiting two unusual features: elongation of the neurapophyses of two presacral vertebrae forming a pointed, hump-like structure and a series of small bumps on the ulna. We think that these bumps are homologous to quill knobs present on some modern birds; the knobs are related to the insertion area of follicular ligaments that anchor the roots of the flight feathers (remiges) to the arm. We propose that Concavenator has integumentary follicular structures inserted on the ulna, as in modern birds. Because scales do not have follicles, we consider the structures anchored to the Concavenator arms to be non-scale skin appendages homologous to the feathers of modern birds. If this is true, then the phylogenetic bracket for the presence of non-scale skin structures homologous to feathers in theropod dinosaurs would be extended to the Neotetanurae, enlarging the scope for explaining the origin of feathers in theropods.

http://links.ealert.nature.com/ctt?kn=248&m=35773183&r=MjA1NzUwMTcwNgS2&b=2&j=ODE0MTc3MTES1&mt=1&rt=0