Good news for readers

Drug use during pregnancy can have detrimental effects--both nonspecific and highly specific--on the perinatal outcome. Nonspecific effects include fetal growth retardation, resulting in small infants and decreased head circumference. Specific effects include facial dysmorphology and organ system anomalies such as alcohol-related birth defects. Patients abusing drugs are at an increased risk for preterm labor, thereby placing an already compromised fetus at increased risk. The number of mothers and infants being infected by the human immunodeficiency virus from sharing needles, multiple sexual contacts, and mother-to-infant transmission is increasing at an alarming rate.     

Good news for sea turtles

Following the overexploitation of sea turtle populations, conservation measures are now in place in many areas. However, the overall impact of these measures is often unknown because there are few long time-series showing trends in population sizes. In a recent paper, George Balazs and Milani Chaloupka chart the number of green turtles Chelonia mydas nesting in Hawaii over the past 30 years and reveal a remarkably quick increase in the size of this population following the instigation of conservation measures during the 1970s. Importantly, this work shows how even a small population of sea turtles can recover rapidly, suggesting that Allee effects do not impede conservation efforts in operation worldwide.     

Good spaced seeds for homology search

MOTIVATION: Filtration is an important technique used to speed up local alignment as exemplified in the BLAST programs. Recently, Ma et al. discovered that better filtering can be achieved by spacing out the matching positions according to a certain pattern, instead of contiguous positions to trigger a local alignment in their PatternHunter program. Such a match pattern is called a spaced seed. RESULTS: Our numerical computation shows that the ranks of spaced seeds (based on sensitivity) change with the sequences similarity. Since homologous sequences may have diverse similarity, we assess the sensitivity of spaced seeds over a range of similarity levels and present a list of good spaced seeds for facilitating homology search in DNA genomic sequences. We validate that the listed spaced seeds are indeed more sensitive using three arbitrarily chosen pairs of DNA genomic sequences.     

善待海洋就是善待人类自己

地球实际是一个大水球,其表面积71％为海洋所覆盖,62％的水域深于1000米。陆地生命归因于海洋生命,我们的空气、食物、住所,都是海洋生物圈的一部分。海洋是人类生命支持系统的重要组成部分,人类每年消耗的海洋食物数量比消耗的牛肉和鸡肉数量之和还要多。世界上近80％的动植物生活在海洋里,从2000年开始,世界上平均每个星期发现3种海洋生物新种,每年发现160种新种。在南太平洋喀里东尼亚的巨大珊瑚礁中采集的一块3立方米的样品中,科学家发现了属于3000种的13万个软体动物,其中许多是新种。     

Good Time for Cell Adhesion and Migration

Our understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms controlling cell adhesion and migration has never been so high. The era of “molecular interactions” requires an appropriate tool for exchanging views, presenting outstanding results and discussing new concepts in the field. This is why we decided to launch Cell Adhesion and Migration (CAM), a multi-disciplinary journal publishing original research articles and reviews covering the latest aspects of cellular and molecular mechanisms and their regulation both during physiological and pathological processes.