blog

The big news this week is the preview launch of the new F1000 website. As you may know, Faculty of 1000 has existed as two separate services since F1000 Medicine was launched about five years ago, but now we’re bringing them back together and adding some new functionality. (By the way, this was the project I worked on when I first got to London, hence the ‘Information Architect’ title that confused so many of my friends.)

The new site integrates the various parts of F1000 (including The Scientist) with a much more modern look, easier navigation and short links and citations (e.g. F1000.com/3594960). The evaluation listing (and there are currently more than 75,000 papers on the site) is completely redesigned. Registered users can now comment on papers directly in the evaluation pages, and we’ve redone the F1000 Factor so it’s (hopefully!) easier to understand. For papers that have been evaluated more than once, we now show the rating that each Faculty Member gave the article. The new scoring system will soon be used to rank journals, and eventually institutions. Further down the line we’re also going to provide F1000 Factors for individual authors, which you’ll be able to put on your own webpage or CV, etc.

And on top of all this we’re still publishing evaluations.

First up, because you know how I feel about the cytoskeleton, Mary Beckerle’s lab has discovered a new stress fibre repair pathway in fibroblasts¹ (beta site link). Zyxin is a protein with three zinc finger domains (called LIM domains) that, it appears, gets recruited to sites of cytoskeleton strain damage and helps repair it. Although this type of damage is quite rare, it still reduces tension transmission to the extracellular matrix, and a repair mechanism has evolved to correct it. A lovely paper, with all sorts of interesting techniques, such as live imaging of strain events and traction microscopy.

In what I’m sure will come as a shock to all fans of Mary Poppins, the Lancet reports that a spoonful of sugar probably doesn’t help the medicine go down. A randomized controlled trial showed that newborn babies, given either sugar or water as placebo, certainly appeared to suffer less pain² (beta link) when pricked in the heel with a lance (a common way of taking blood from newborns), there was no difference in nervous or reflex activity between the two groups. As our FM points out,

The interpretation of these results is complicated by the fact that newborns cannot verbalize their pain experience

and the authors argue that the sucrose blocks the babies’ facial motor activity, but not the pain experience.

Finally for this week, a paper that reminded me of a previous life. A new development in fluorescence microscopy—a ‘super-registration approach’—has been used to measure the rate of movement of RNA through nuclear pores³ (beta link). The authors achieved resolution on the order of 20 ms and better than 26 nm spatially. Impressive. They find that the rate of RNA transport through the pore is not limiting; rather it’s the initial docking on the nuclear face and release on the cytoplasmic side that slows things down. That RNA fair zips through, which makes a lot of sense to me (the inside of the nuclear pore is a strange place, and sensible molecules like to get out of there just as as soon as they can).

That’s all for now. Go and play with the preview website!

Evaluated papers

1. Repairing stress 10.1016/j.devcel.2010.08.008
2. Baby pain 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61303-7
3. RNA transport 10.1038/nature09438