Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>Seismicity and Relative Risk, the IBI Prize–winning module, utilizes freely available earthquake data to help students apply their knowledge to risk-related decision-making.</jats:p>

<jats:p> A monthly roundup of recent news and projects of <jats:italic>Science</jats:italic> 's publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. </jats:p>

<jats:p>Only a small fraction of the immense diversity of plant metabolism has been explored for the production of new medicines and other products important to human well-being. The availability of inexpensive high-throughput sequencing is rapidly expanding the number of species that can be investigated for the speedy discovery of previously unknown enzymes and pathways. Exploitation of these resources is being carried out through interdisciplinary synthetic and chemical biology to engineer pathways in plant and microbial systems for improving the production of existing medicines and to create libraries of biologically active products that can be screened for new drug applications.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Most mineral elements found in plant tissues come exclusively from the soil, necessitating that plants adapt to highly variable soil compositions to survive and thrive. Profiling element concentrations in genetically diverse plant populations is providing insights into the plant-environment interactions that control elemental accumulation, as well as identifying the underlying genes. The resulting molecular understanding of plant adaptation to the environment both demonstrates how soils can shape genetic diversity and provides solutions to important agricultural challenges.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Metabolic engineering of plants can reduce the cost and environmental impact of agriculture while providing for the needs of a growing population. Although our understanding of plant metabolism continues to increase at a rapid pace, relatively few plant metabolic engineering projects with commercial potential have emerged, in part because of a lack of principles for the rational manipulation of plant phenotype. One underexplored approach to identifying such design principles derives from analysis of the dominant constraints on plant fitness, and the evolutionary innovations in response to those constraints, that gave rise to the enormous diversity of natural plant metabolic pathways.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Plants possess multifunctional and rapidly evolving specialized metabolic enzymes. Many metabolites do not appear to be immediately required for survival; nonetheless, many may contribute to maintaining population fitness in fluctuating and geographically dispersed environments. Others may serve no contemporary function but are produced inevitably as minor products by single enzymes with varying levels of catalytic promiscuity. The dominance of the terrestrial realm by plants likely mirrored expansion of specialized metabolism originating from primary metabolic pathways. Compared with their evolutionarily constrained counterparts in primary metabolism, specialized metabolic enzymes may be more tolerant to mutations normally considered destabilizing to protein structure and function. If this is true, permissiveness may partially explain the pronounced chemodiversity of terrestrial plants.</jats:p>

<jats:p> Another “green revolution” is needed for crop yields to meet demands for food. The international C <jats:sub>4</jats:sub> Rice Consortium is working toward introducing a higher-capacity photosynthetic mechanism—the C <jats:sub>4</jats:sub> pathway—into rice to increase yield. The goal is to identify the genes necessary to install C <jats:sub>4</jats:sub> photosynthesis in rice through different approaches, including genomic and transcriptional sequence comparisons and mutant screening. </jats:p>

<jats:p>Nitrogen (N)–based fertilizers increase agricultural productivity but have detrimental effects on the environment and human health. Research is generating improved understanding of the signaling components plants use to sense N and regulate metabolism, physiology, and growth and development. However, we still need to integrate these regulatory factors into signal transduction pathways and connect them to downstream response pathways. Systems biology approaches facilitate identification of new components and N-regulatory networks linked to other plant processes. A holistic view of plant N nutrition should open avenues to translate this knowledge into effective strategies to improve N-use efficiency and enhance crop production systems for more sustainable agricultural practices.</jats:p>

<jats:title>The Immune System in Three Dimensions</jats:title> <jats:p> Immune cells must traffic within the tissues in which they reside and also through the bloodstream and lymphatic system in order to defend the host against infection. Until 10 years ago, immunologists had very little idea about how the immune response was coordinated in three dimensions. This all changed with the application of two-photon microscopy, applied intravitally or on tissue explants, to the immune system. <jats:bold> Germain <jats:italic>et al.</jats:italic> </jats:bold> (p. <jats:related-article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="doi" page="1676" related-article-type="in-this-issue" vol="336" xlink:href="10.1126/science.1221063">1676</jats:related-article> ) review how studies using this technology have informed our knowledge of immune system dynamics and discuss how to apply this technology in the future to gather further insights. </jats:p>