Salk researchers report that the protein SRF3 both restores iron balance after a microbial attack and keeps a plant's immune response calibrated. The experiments started in Arabidopsis, a laboratory stand-in for crops such as wheat or corn, so the breeding payoff its authors describe is still a prospect.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
Dana-Farber researchers safely combined paricalcitol, an approved vitamin D drug, with chemotherapy in a small trial in metastatic pancreatic cancer. Its strongest survival signal came in tumours rich in the vitamin D receptor, a possible way to choose patients that a larger trial still has to test.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+40
- Incentives65
- Confidence50
Standard gene models leave out short open reading frames, so a Salk team built a search database that includes them and pointed it at existing proteomics data from postmortem frontal cortex samples.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives30
- Confidence60
Salk researchers recorded and then manipulated the amygdalostriatal transition zone in freely moving mice, and report in Neuron that dopamine-expressing neurons there are needed to mount a fear response.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives60
- Confidence52
The Salk Institute has $18 million from the Bezos Earth Fund to measure in four states' fields what its lab work estimated at one metric ton of carbon dioxide per hectare a year, with the first results due this fall.
Reality
- Evidence38
- Adoption8
- Hype gap+16
- Incentives68
- Confidence52
In Science, a Salk Institute team reports that melanoma cells held in type II interferon spill double-stranded mitochondrial RNA, setting off a type I response that raises COX2 and PGE2, and those cells grew tumors faster in mice.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives68
- Confidence58
Salk's mouse model left the Tbr1 protein abundant and put methyl tags on the DNA it has to land on. Deep-layer neurons developed poorly, and the electrophysiological consequences were still there in adulthood.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives70
- Confidence50
A modulator credited with both raising and lowering aggression in flies can now be probed one cell type at a time, some types as small as a pair of neurons, moving the story from chemical to cellular resolution.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption15
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives55
- Confidence52