It’s going to be a good year. Back at the beginning of December I tipped you off that we were approaching a quite amazing statistic, the publication of our 100,000th evaluation. I’m now happy to let you know that #100,000 went live on Tuesday this week: High CO2 enhances the competitive strength of seaweeds over…
We published an evaluation in November from Guilhem Janbon at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, of a paper that reported a surprising new mechanism for evolutionary intron loss (free link to F1000 evaluation: you can read the original paper in Science).
Ajit Varki, distinguished professor in the departments of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine at the UCSD, was one of the first researchers to recognize the importance of glycans—the sugar molecules that decorate the surface of cells. He is profiled in the December issue of ASBMB Today, with a focus on the larger context of…
Critical differences between the human immune system and that of other primates, such as chimpanzees and rhesus macaques, lead to humans being more susceptible to a number of infectious agents including HIV and malaria. Now, the first genome-wide functional comparison in chimps, macaques and humans reveals changes in immune system gene expression that could explain…
An update on my take on the Arsenic story, with both positive and negative comments, is worth reading over at Carl Zimmer’s place. Science magazine has made the original paper free to view (with the lead author’s personal email address in plain sight. Eek.) Our evaluation is also free to view. And just for fun,…
Where should we concentrate conservation efforts? Back in January, Kevin Gaston at the University of Sheffield argued in Science that conservation efforts should be directed towards common species as well as the ‘obvious’, rare and ‘threatened’ ones1. The argument is beguilingly simple. In the absence of a detailed understanding of what each species does in…
More from the Society for Neuroscience meeting: Faculty Member David Adams is director of the Health Innovations Research Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne. His research on cone snail venom has led to development of a new analgesic against neuropathic pain. Cone snail toxins—conotoxins—are small peptides. David’s group engineered a proteolysis-resistant version by cyclizing alpha-conotoxin Vc1.11, which…
I know, you’re all expecting me to talk about rockstars and GQ this week. Well, that’s been done to death all over the place, so here’s something else I stumbled across—the periodic table at a party: Yeah, there are few things wrong with that (potassium should really be ripping the arms off water, for example)…
The F1000 roving camera was at the Society for Neuroscience meeting this week (you can get a somewhat peculiar take on the proceedings from my friend Tideliar). Faculty Member Randy Nelson, of Ohio State University, spoke to Sarah Greene about his recent work published in PNAS, which uncovered a potentially disturbing link between light at…
We’re pleased to welcome Stephen Brimijoin to the Faculty. Steve is at the Mayo Clinic and has come up with a method of—hopefully—preventing former drug users from relapsing. He’s now received a ‘substantial’ grant to transfer the method from a rat model into humans. Cocaine-destroying engines
