You are what your dad ate

Maternal nutrition and metabolism are critical determinants of adult offspring health. Recent reports describe adverse offspring outcomes associated with the father's diet, indicating nongenetic inheritance of paternal experience. Determining underlying mechanisms may require reconsideration of our understanding of the heritability of epigenetic states.     

Jurassic PARK2: You eat your mitochondria,and you are what your mitochondria eat

Park2/Parkin is a central mediator of selective mitochondrial autophagy for mitochondrial quality control. We showed in mouse hearts that PINK1/Mfn2/Park2 mediated generalized mitophagy is essential to the normal perinatal transition from fetal mitochondria that prefer carbohydrates as metabolic substrates to adult fatty-acid metabolizing mitochondria. Our findings demonstrate how functional interactions between mitophagic mitochondrial removal and biogenic mitochondrial replacement facilitate metabolic maturation of the heart.     

Deleterious SNP prediction: be mindful of your training data!

MOTIVATION: To predict which of the vast number of human single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are deleterious to gene function or likely to be disease associated is an important problem, and many methods have been reported in the literature. All methods require data sets of mutations classified as 'deleterious' or 'neutral' for training and/or validation. While different workers have used different data sets there has been no study of which is best. Here, the three most commonly used data sets are analysed. We examine their contents and relate this to classifiers, with the aims of revealing the strengths and pitfalls of each data set, and recommending a best approach for future studies. RESULTS: The data sets examined are shown to be substantially different in content, particularly with regard to amino acid substitutions, reflecting the different ways in which they are derived. This leads to differences in classifiers and reveals some serious pitfalls of some data sets, making them less than ideal for non-synonymous SNP prediction. AVAILABILITY: Software is available on request from the authors.     

我的驯鹿,我的梦想——玛丽亚·索的诉说

一个不足200人的群体,一群不足800头的驯鹿,得到了政府的大力扶持,却依然在传统与现代的夹缝中徘徊。让我们倾听他们从山林里发出的微弱声音,跟他们一起思考:传统和现代,先进和落后……