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Protein in embryo cells might be a reason for right- or left-handedness

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A young left handed child draws with a crayon on an easel.

Credit: incamerastock/Alamy

Left-handed people are almost three times more likely to have rare variants in the genes for tubulins, proteins that build cells’ internal skeletons. Tubulins assemble into long filaments called microtubules, which control the shapes and movements of cells. Microtubules could influence handedness because they form hair-like protrusions in cell membranes that can direct fluid flows in an asymmetric way during embryonic development.

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: Nature Communications paper

Super-Earth LHS 3844b is the first exoplanet to show convincing signs of tidal synchronization, meaning one of its hemispheres is permanently illuminated by its star and the other is in permanent darkness. The planet is relatively cool, indicating that it lacks the tidal heating non-locked planets experience. It’s unclear whether tidally locked planets could be habitable. These worlds “don’t have tides, or seasons or day–night cycles”, says astronomer and study co-author Nicolas Cowan. “Could you get the same kind of diversity and complexity of life evolving? I have no idea.”

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: The Astrophysical Journal paper

Biotechnology company LyGenesis has injected donor liver cells into a lymph node of a person with liver failure for the first time. The idea is that, within months, the donor cells will grow into a blood-filtering ‘miniature liver’. “It’s a very bold and incredibly innovative idea,” says liver-regeneration specialist Valerie Gouon-Evans. The treatment, which has been trialled in mice, dogs and pigs, might not relieve all of the complications of end-stage liver disease — but could provide a stopgap until a donor organ becomes available or make people healthy enough to undergo a transplant.

Nature | 5 min read

Nearly 20% of almost 600 image-containing papers that scientists compiled for a systematic review had suspicious images, including those that had been duplicated, stretched or rotated. Out of the 132 studies the researchers included in their final review, which was about a test to identify depression-related symptoms in rats, 10 contained potentially doctored images. Analysing these 10 alone assessed the test as 50% more effective than did the remaining 122 studies. This “clearly highlights [that falsified images] are impacting our consolidated knowledge base”, says systematic-review methodologist Alexandra Bannach-Brown.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Features & opinion

When microbes’ ability to develop is pitted against their ability to make pharmaceuticals or biofuels, “the cells are going to choose to grow every time”, says synthetic biologist Brian Pfleger. To sidestep this unwinnable metabolic-resource war, researchers are introducing new biosynthesis pathways that can run alongside natural processes. For this, they have zeroed in on cofactors, small molecules that help enzymes do their work. Eventually, synthetic cofactors paired with the enzymes that use them could allow cells to churn out compounds more efficiently or even make those that rarely occur in nature.

Nature | 11 min read

With Twitter on the wane among many scientists — both as a place to post and a source of social-media data — some are turning to Reddit. Access to Reddit data is free for non-commercial researchers and academics. And its communities offer a space to network and chat, with an ‘upvote and downvote’ system helping good content rise to the top. Nature offers some context and advice for those looking to take the plunge.

Nature | 10 min read

Cancer cells make proteins found nowhere else in the body. Vaccines could teach the body’s immune system to recognise these proteins and destroy the cancer cells. The most powerful vaccines are created from the specific proteins extracted from a patient’s tumour and, in some cases, use the patient’s own immune cells. Researchers are also working on doing this vaccination process entirely within the body: first, drugs activate the immune system, then radiotherapy kills cancer cells, releasing the cancer proteins for the switched-on immune cells to find.

Nature | 4 min video

This article is part of Nature Outline: Cancer vaccines, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support from Moderna.

Where I work

Muh Aris Marfai measures the ground level compared to level zero of the sea (average sea level) using a geodetic digital level, at a tide gauge station at the Sunda Kelapa port of Jakarta, Indonesia.

Muh Aris Marfai is head of the Geospatial Information Agency of Indonesia in Bogor and a geography researcher at the Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.Credit: Gaia Squarci for Nature

Geographer Muh Aris Marfai collects reference data for Indonesia’s coastal areas to prepare for the impacts of climate change. “Because so much of the country is surrounded by water, it’s important to pay attention to coastal areas,” he says. “Many coastal cities, including Jakarta, are experiencing subsidence owing to geological processes and coastal dynamics.” (Nature | 3 min read)

Quote of the day

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s blockbuster new book The Anxious Generation suggests that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness — but its claims are not backed up by science, writes psychologist Candice Odgers. (Nature | 6 min read)

Today I’m enjoying the fish doorbell — a charming solution to alert the lock keepers of Utrech’s boat canal to let through migrating fish. A webcam allows watchers to ‘ring the doorbell’ for the fish, sending a photo to ecologists who signal that it’s time to clear the underwater traffic jam. The doorbell has struck a chord with nature-lovers, meaning the 950-ish slots for aspiring doorbell-ringers are often full. And even if you do get access, you might wait days to spot a fish in the murky waters. But all the enthusiasm is good news for ecologist Mark van Heukelum, who created the gadget. “We ‘only’ get a thousand pictures of every fish that appears for the camera,” he jokes on the fish-doorbell website.

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

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Right- or left-handed? Protein in embryo cells might help decide

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A young left handed child draws with a crayon on an easel.

Dozens of genetic factors have been associated with left-handedness, which occurs in roughly one in ever ten people.Credit: incamerastock/Alamy

To what extent do genes determine how you pick up your morning cup of coffee? Researchers examined rare genetic variants from a database of more than 350,000 individuals’ genetic data to hunt for clues for what influences handedness in humans. Their findings implicate tubulins — proteins that build cells’ internal skeletons.

The results, published on 2 April in Nature Communications1, were obtained specifically at protein-coding parts of the DNA, and add to previous studies that linked genetic variations with handedness .

“This is an important and significant study” that supports tubulins’ involvement in determining the left–right brain asymmetry, says Sebastian Ocklenburg, a neuroscientist at the Medical School Hamburg in Germany.

During the embryonic stage of human development, the left and right brain hemispheres get wired differently, which in part determines innate behaviours, such as where we lean when we hug someone, on which side of our mouth we tend to chew our food and, most prominently, which hand is our dominant one. This turns out to be the left hand for around 10% of the human population.

Because most people have a clear preference for one hand over the other, finding genes linked to handedness can provide clues for the genetic basis of the brain’s left–right asymmetry.

Previous studies looking at genome-wide data from UK Biobank2 found 48 common genetic variants associated with left-handedness, which were mostly in non-coding regions of the DNA. These included sections that could control the expression of genes related to tubulins. These proteins assemble into long, tube-like filaments called microtubules, which control the shapes and movements of cells.

But Clyde Francks, a geneticist and neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and his team looked for genetic variants in protein-coding sequences. Their analysis of 313,271 right-handed and 38,043 left-handed individuals’ genetic data, from the UK Biobank, uncovered variants in a tubulin gene, dubbed TUBB4B, which were 2.7 times more common in left-handed people than in right-handers.

Microtubules could influence handedness because they form cilia — hair-like protrusions in cell membranes — which can direct fluid flows in an asymmetric way during development.

In spite of affecting only a small proportion of the people in this considerable data set, rare variants “can give clues to developmental mechanisms of brain asymmetry in everyone”, Francks says. He adds that these findings pave the way for future work to determine how microtubules, which themselves have a molecular ‘handedness’, can give an “asymmetric twist” to early brain development.

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Scientists made a six-legged mouse embryo — here’s why

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This six-legged animal isn’t an insect: it’s a mouse with two extra limbs where its genitals should be. Research on this genetically engineered rodent, which was published on 20 March in Nature Communications1, has revealed a way in which changes in DNA’s 3D structure can affect how embryos develop.

Developmental biologist Moisés Mallo, at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Oeiras, Portugal, and his colleagues were studying one of the receptor proteins, Tgfbr1, in a signalling pathway that is involved in many aspects of embryonic development. The scientists inactivated the Tgfbr1 gene in mouse embryos about halfway through development to see how the change affected spinal-cord development.

Then, Mallo’s graduate student, Anastasiia Lozovska, came to his office to tell him she’d found that one of the bioengineered embryos had genitals that looked similar to two extra hind limbs. Her finding sent the research down an unexpected path. “I didn’t choose the project, the project chose me,” Mallo says.

3D reconstruction of the limb skeleton of a Tgfbr1-cKO fetus obtained by OPT and after segmentation of the limb skeleton. Extra hindlimbs are in magenta. Ossification shown in yellow.

A 3D reconstruction of the skeleton of the genetically altered embryo shows its extra and normal limbs (magenta and turquoise, respectively).Credit: Anastasiia Lozovska et al/Nat. Comms

Researchers have long known that, in most four-limbed animals, both the external genitalia (penis or clitoris) and hind limbs develop from the same primordial structures.

When Mallo’s team looked further into the six-legged mouse phenomenon, they found that Tgfbr1 directs these structures to become either genitalia or limbs by altering the way that DNA folds in the structure’s cells. Deactivating the protein changed the activity of other genes, resulting in extra limbs and no true external genitalia.

The researchers hope to determine whether Tgfbr1 and its relatives affect DNA structure in other systems such as metastatic cancer, and in immune function. They are also examining whether the same mechanism underlies the development of the reptilian hemipenis, a double penis that, in snakes, forms from primordial organs in lieu of legs.

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