Body

As our bodies first form, developing cells are a lot like children put on the school bus with their names and addresses pinned to their shirts.

The notes identify one as a future heart cell, another as a liver cell, a third as a neuron. And that's what they each grow up to be.

But once those cells reach adulthood, changes to those original marching orders caused by aging, disease and other stressors like smoking can precipitate a kind of identity crisis, researchers at the University of Michigan Health System have found.

The world's largest database on plants' functional properties, or traits, has been pub-lished. Scientists compiled three million traits for 69,000 out of the world's ~300,000 plant species. The achievement rests on a worldwide collaboration of scientists from 106 re-search institutions. The initiative, known as TRY, is hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena (Germany).

Geoffroy Berthelot and Stephane Len, both researchers at the IRMES (Institut de Recherche bioMédicale et d'Epidemiologie du Sport at INSEP, Paris, France), have published their findings in Age, the official journal of the American Aging Association, describing the evolution of performances in elite athletes and chess grandmasters. This article is congruous with the epidemiological approaches developed by the laboratory, and suggests that changes in individual performance are linked to physiological laws structuring the living world.

A study published by the University of Reading's Centre for Agri Environmental Research suggests that honeybees may not be as important to pollination services in the UK than previously supposed. The research was published in the Journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment.

Winning margins in the Tour de France can be tight – last year just 39 seconds separated the top two riders after more than 90 hours in the saddle. When every second counts, riders do everything possible to gain a competitive advantage – from using aerodynamic carbon fibre bikes to the very latest in sports nutrition.

Now there could be a new, completely legal and rather surprising weapon in the armoury for riders aiming to shave vital seconds off their time – beetroot juice.

A musculoskeletal system so far unknown in the animal world was recently discovered in weevils. The hip of Trigonopterus oblongus does not consist of the usual hinges, but of joints based on a screw-and-nut system. This first biological screw thread is about half a millimeter in size and was studied in detail using synchrotron radiation. The discovery is reported by the current issue of the Science magazine. (DOI:10.1126/science.1204245)

Viruses are the most abundant parasites on Earth. Well known viruses, such as the flu virus, attack human hosts, while viruses such as the tobacco mosaic virus infect plant hosts.

More common, but less understood, are cases of viruses infecting bacteria known as bacteriophages, or phages. In part, this is due to the difficulty of culturing bacteria and viruses that have been cut off from their usual biological surroundings in a process called in vitro.

Integration with a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) improves radiologists' use of clinical decision support tools, according to a study in the July issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology (www.jacr.org).

DARIEN, Ill. – A study in the July 1 issue of the journal SLEEP shows that sleep extension is beneficial to athletic performance, reaction time, vigor, fatigue and mood in collegiate basketball players. The study is the first to document sleep extension and the athletic performance of actively competing athletes.

A new study shows that differences in the vulnerability of animals to a virus are crucial to understanding patterns of infection, and that variation in susceptibility to two marginally different viruses increases the number of infections when the two virus variants are present in the same animal. This study, by researchers from the Netherlands and Spain, will be published on June 30th in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology.

Pheromone preference, and the initiation of a complex programmed sexual behavior, is determined by the specificity of a single sex pheromone receptor protein expressed in a population of olfactory receptor neurons in the silkmoth (Bombyx mori). The study, which will be published on June 30th in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, provides the first direct proof of the long-held belief that the control of sexual behavior in male moths originates in the chemical specificity of the pheromone receptor proteins expressed in pheromone receptor neurons.

Researchers have developed a new strategy to improve the outcome of genome-wide association (GWA) studies.

GWA studies involve rapidly scanning markers across the genomes of many people. By doing this, scientists can look for the association between certain genetic markers or variants within the population, and a particular trait, including disease. However, the challenge is to take these initial association signals and identify the functional DNA changes and their molecular consequences. This is an important step in translating these findings into clinical benefits.

LA JOLLA, CA— Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found clues to the functioning of an important damage response protein in cells. The protein, p53, can cause cells to stop dividing or even to commit suicide when they show signs of DNA damage, and it is responsible for much of the tissue destruction that follows exposure to ionizing radiation or DNA-damaging drugs such as the ones commonly used for cancer therapy.

WHAT: A trio of large-scale genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, have identified more than 15 gene variants responsible for the diversity of white blood cell counts among whites, African-Americans, and Japanese. Supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, each study examined the genomes of tens of thousands of people. Combined, the studies offer the first comprehensive analysis into why some people, and some populations, have more or fewer white blood cells than others.

All three articles will be published online June 30 in PLoS Genetics.