User recommended papers

User-recommended papers allows you to suggest a paper you would like to see on Nature China. When these papers appear on our site, users may comment and vote on them. To recommend a paper please use this form. Please note that you cannot recommend a paper you have authored. The editors will reject any self-recommendations. All comments and recommendation are checked by the editors and may be edited prior to publication on the site.

  • 2 votes

    Ecology & Evolution

    • No Detectable Maternal Effects of Elevated CO2 on Arabidopsis thaliana Over 15 Generations


      • Original article citation: PLoS ONE 4," e6035 ,

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution and Earth & Environment
      • Recommended by : Yuhua Wang on 06/25/2009 02:47PM GMT

        The atmospheric CO2 concentration is projected to roughly double by the end of this century and the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration has appealed to many people and governments in the world. They wonder how future plants will respond to this global change. In response, many researchers have attempted to answer the question. Generally, they put current plants to elevated CO2 close to future atmospheric CO2 concentration and put forward the predictions based on experiment results within one generation of plants or a period of one generation. However, because plants may adapt to this global change in the long term, thus those predictions can be challenged. In order to solve this problem, the authors performed a fifteen-generation experiment to determine maternal effects of elevated CO2 plants over 5 years. The experiment design is very novel and original, and has never been reported previously. In addition, the results are very intriguing, suggesting that the maternal effects of elevated CO2 failed to extend to the offspring due to the potential lack of genetic variation for CO2 responsiveness, and future plants may not evolve specific adaptations to future elevated CO2. The results are contrast to many previous reports. Furthermore, the study provides a first experimental evidence to confirm the widely accepted assumption in many studies that plant responses to elevated CO2 observed within a single generation are similar to those observed over many generations. I do believe that the novel experimental design and interesting results will appeal scientific and popular readers, thus I recommend this article.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made

  • 5 votes

    Earth & Environment

    • Climate change, land use change, and China’s food security in the twenty-first century: an integrated perspective


      • Original article citation: Climatic Change 93," 433 - 445, (2009).

      • Categories: Earth & Environment, Ecology & Evolution, and Materials
      • Recommended by : Jinwei Dong on 06/05/2009 11:50AM GMT

        Food security of China is always a principal problem for China even the whole world. And substantive studies have focused on the topic because of the challenges from loss of cropland, population growth, and water shortages. However, existed studies have generally failed to comprehensively consider future scenarios concluding climate change, land use, socioeconomic and technological scenarios. The paper provided an integrated perspective on China’s food demand and supply in future based on all the data from the aspects of land, population, climate and socioeconomic scenarios. The results provided effective and valuable conclusions for decision making of the government and future researches.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made

  • 4 votes

    Neuroscience

  • 4 votes

    Cell & Molecular Biology

    • Impediment of E. coli UvrD by DNA-destabilizing force reveals a strained-inchworm mechanism of DNA unwinding


      • Original article citation: EMBO J doi:10.1038/emboj.2008.240 (2008)

      • Categories: Cell & Molecular Biology and Genetics
      • Recommended by : Alison Wrigley on 11/21/2008 11:05AM GMT

        Escherichia coli UvrD is a non-ring-shaped model helicase, displaying a 3'–5' polarity in DNA unwinding. Using a transverse magnetic tweezer and DNA hairpins, we measured the unwinding kinetics of UvrD at various DNA-destabilizing forces. The multiform patterns of unwinding bursts and the distributions of the off-times favour the mechanism that UvrD unwinds DNA as a dimer. The two subunits of the dimer coordinate to unwind DNA processively. They can jointly switch strands and translocate backwards on the other strand to allow slow (approx40 bp/s) rewinding, or unbind simultaneously to allow quick rehybridization. Partial dissociation of the dimer results in pauses in the middle of the unwinding or increases the translocation rate from approx40 to approx150 nt/s in the middle of the rewinding. Moreover, the unwinding rate was surprisingly found to decrease from approx45 to approx10 bp/s when the force is increased from 2 to 12 pN. The results lead to a strained-inchworm mechanism in which a conformational change that bends and tenses the ssDNA is required to activate the dimer.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made

  • 6 votes

    Ecology & Evolution

    • An uncultivated crenarchaeota contains functional bacteriochlorophyll a synthase


      • Original article citation: ISME J doi:10.1038/ismej.2008.85 (2008)

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution, Cell & Molecular Biology, and Earth & Environment
      • Recommended by : Alison Wrigley on 11/06/2008 02:52PM GMT

        A fosmid clone 37F10 containing an archaeal 16S rRNA gene was screened out from a metagenomic library of Pearl River sediment, southern China. Sequence analysis of the 35 kb inserted fragment of 37F10 found that it contains a single 16S rRNA gene belonging to Miscellaneous Crenarchaeotal Group (MCG) and 36 open reading frames (ORFs). One ORF (orf11) encodes putative bacteriochlorophyll a synthase (bchG) gene. Bacteriochlorophyll a synthase gene has never been reported in a member of the domain Archaea, in accordance with the fact that no (bacterio)-chlorophyll has ever been detected in any cultivated archaea. The putative archaeal bchG (named as ar-bchG) was cloned and heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli. The protein was found to be capable of synthesizing bacteriochlorophyll a by esterification of bacteriochlorophyllide a with phytyl diphosphate or geranylgeranyl diphosphate. Furthermore, phylogenetic analysis clearly indicates that the ar-bchG diverges before the bacterial bchGs. Our results for the first time demonstrate that a key and functional enzyme for bacteriochlorophyll a biosynthesis does exist in Archaea.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made

  • 6 votes

    Physics

    • Resonance capacity of surface plasmon on subwavelength metallic structures

      • Ying Gu, Liangliang Chen, Haixi Zhang, Qihuang Gong
        Original article citation: Europhys. Lett. 83," 27004 , (2008).

      • Categories: Physics and Materials
      • Recommended by : Limin Tong on 08/13/2008 02:50AM GMT

        Plasmonics — the coupling between the light and the collective oscillation of free electrons in metal — becomes one of the important branches in nanooptics due to its applications in nanodevices breaking through the diffraction limit. In this paper, Qihuang Gong and co-workers at Peking University in Beijing have provided a new method, Green’s matrix method, to directly design the surface plasmon resonances in irregular nanometer metals. By introducing the resonance capacity associated to the electric energy of a resonant nanostructure, the researchers can select those strong resonances with respect to the parameter dielectric permittivity. They used this resonance capacity to study the optical antenna and good agreement with previously reported experimental results is obtained. They also gave us an elegant way to understand the electrostatic limit. If the dimension of structure is largely below the wavelength, the resonance peaks become insensitive to the illumination wavelength. Starting from a given geometry, the proposed technique can give us the plasmon resonances information at some wavelength. Conversely, at a specific wavelength, it can also determine the geometry to which the real metal can access. So it is extremely useful to design the plasmonic structures with optical resonances in a specific spectral region.
      • Comment on this subject: 1 comment made

  • 7 votes

    Neuroscience

  • 8 votes

    Neuroscience

    • Auditory fear conditioning modulates prepulse inhibition in socially reared rats and isolation-reared rats.

      • Nanxin Li, Junli Ping, Rongbin Wu, Chao Wang, Xihong Wu, Liang Li
        Original article citation: Behavioral Neuroscience 122," 107 - 118, (2008).

      • Categories: Neuroscience
      • Recommended by : Chun Wang on 07/30/2008 08:05PM GMT

        This fascinating study for the first time shows that isolation rearing could not only impair prepulse inhibition, a commonly used sensorimotor gating model of schizophrenia, but also significantly impair the attentional modulation of prepulse inhibition. The authors further demonstrate that this effect is modulated via metabolic glutamate receptors. This work provides a brand new animal model for investigating both neural bases and cognitive features of schizophrenia.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made

  • 15 votes

    Physics

  • 2 votes

    Ecology & Evolution

    • Chloroplast phylogeography of Dipentodon (Dipentodontaceae) in southwest China and northern Vietnam

      • QING-JUN YUAN, ZHI-YONG ZHANG, HUA PENG, SONG GE
        Original article citation: Mol Ecol 17," 1054 - 1065, (2008).

      • Categories: Ecology & Evolution, Genetics, and Cell & Molecular Biology
      • Recommended by : zhang xuemei on 04/12/2008 02:13AM GMT

        This is an excellent and meaningful papar involving the conceivably most complicated evolutionary history in the southeast Tibetan Plateau,where the topography and climate are extremely complex. The incumbent target is also an attractive monotypic genus Dipentodon sinicus. By using chloroplast sequences, important results were obtained providing new insights to the evolution of biodiversity on the Tibetan Plateau and adiacent areas. Also, a historical framework for the conservation of biodiversity in this area was given. In summary, it is an informative and helpful paper for understanding the Dipentodon and Tibetan Plateau.
      • Comment on this subject: 0 comments made
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