Ученые Института цитологии и генетики СО РАН, совместно с американскими и французскими коллегами, исследовали мутации гена-онкосупрессора lgl у дрозофил. В результате обнаружился интересный факт: две дозы гена, который в норме блокирует развитие опухоли, в условиях стресса становятся избыточными. Утрата же одной дозы lgl повышает выживаемость и длительность жизни. Открытие поможет разобраться в парадоксах действия многих факторов генетического риска у человека.

The Russian researchers at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Demographic Research, Duke University (USA), jointly with their French colleagues have investigated the mutation, the double dose of which causes malignant growths, but a single dose increases stress resistance and prolongs life. Thus, due to the benefits provided by the mutation, the population preserves high risk of cancer.
The overwhelming majority of genes are represented in two copies in the cells of animals: one is received from the mother, the other - from the father. In many cases, the organism endures with difficulty the damage to one of the copies: a single dose of a gene may be insufficient for normal evolution. However, for some genes a single dose is not simply endurable but also welcome. Such cases deal primarily with the genes that increase life span and stress resistance. Individuals with a single normal copy of such gene (the second copy is desperately spoiled as a result of mutation) live longer and better endure unfavorable conditions. But, the owners of a double dose of the mutant gene are either nonviable or more frequently than others die of some disease such as malignant growth.
Investigation of mutations in stress resistance genes is only possible on models, and the researchers worked with drosophilas. They studied the lgl tumor suppressor gene. Human beings have the gene with the same functions, it is called Hugl-1. If normal copies of the gene are absent in the cells, frequency of cancer occurrence is high. It may seem that such detrimental mutation should be abolished by selection, however, the lgl gene mutations are rather frequently found in the population. Why?
It has turned out that the drosophilas containing one mutant copy and one normal copy of the gene possess increased embryonic survival rate if they develop at stressful temperatures (16 and 29 degrees centigrade). At the temperature of 25 degrees (which is optimal for flies), viability of mutation carriers is slightly lower that the one of owners of the double gene dose. Besides, mutation carries have a longer life span.
These useful properties become normally apparent in case if mutation was received from the mother. Apparently, increased viability of flies is being formed in the early embryonic evolution stage and depends on the maternal genotype. Mutation carriers are more stable to viral infections.
Thus, if the gene does not work at all in case of two mutant copies, then probability of cancer development in the organism is high, and a single copy of the gene (in case of one mutant copy) in some way ensures optimal state of the organism in stress conditions.
Cancer development with human beings and animals is a complicated, multi-stag process connected with the loss or damage of certain genes. The drosophila investigations carried out by the Russian researchers help to understand why the mutations that can cause cancer do not disappear from the population but are preserved in it.

В послании Федеральному Собранию президент России Владимир Путин выделил нанотехнологии в качестве наиболее приоритетного направления развития науки и техники. О глобальных тенденциях и российском потенциале в сфере нанотехнологий – в интервью с Барбарой Фостер, президентом Microscopy/Marketing & Education, Inc. и стратегическим консультантом Nanotech America.

An interview on global trends in nanoscience instruments and education with 30-year veteran Barbara Foster, President Microscopy/Marketing & Education, Inc. Foster shares why Russia offers innovative new tools, and some broader lessons for nanoscientists.
Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin put nanotechnology right at the top of spending priorities for his country - only housing and roads were more important. Many nanoscientists may have briefly raised an eyebrow, and then peered back into their microscope. But, one nanotech expert familiar with Russia says we should take more notice and even take a lesson or two.
Nano World News talks with Barbara Foster, a strategic consultant for the microscopy and imaging world, whose key client, Nanotech America, is the North American distributor for NT-MDT, a leading Russian device maker. Ms. Foster shared why Russia has lessons and tools that could help take U.S. nanoresearchers into the future.
"Modularity and hybridization are two key trends driving the latest in nanotechnology instruments," Foster told Nano World News. "When you think about it, the reasons are obvious. Scientists are learning more about the fundamentals of their own areas of nanoresearch, but the way to move to the next level, including commercialization of new nanotechnologies, is to reach out and work with those in other disciplines," Foster said.
All across nanoscience, Foster said she sees more frequent examples of multi-disciplinary work, where professionals from chemistry, biology, physics and even electronics are recognizing the need to work with each other. But, it's not always that simple. She observed that "in the US, we've tended to compartmentalize our science. One group may have a specialty tool that works for them, but if scientists are focused just on their specific discipline, they might not be aware that the same tool can solve their problems. In other parts of the world, scientists tend to see things from a more integrated perspective, and that's an important lesson for us to learn."
"For instance," she went on, "for over half a century, there has been a schism between imaging and spectroscopy." A graduate level chemist by training who came to microscopy as a second career, she is part of a rare group who straddles both arenas. She has also worked inside the imaging industry, including being a technical marketing manager for Zeiss and Cambridge Instruments (now part of Leica), and as president of her own nanotech and biotech consultant firm Microscopy/Marketing & Education, Inc. (Allen, TX), she fully understands the business implications of bringing these two technologies together.
"This schism meant chemists worked in a black-box. They rarely watched their analyses or experiments at the real-world, micro level, leaving the results open to misinterpretation. Nanoscience is changing a lot of that. We're seeing new demand convergence of technologies that are literally opening the eyes of researchers, engineers, and analysts. Light, Confocal, Electron (SEM and TEM), and Atomic Force (AFM) microscopies are colliding with FTIR and RAMAN spectroscopies, all driven by new, often 3D, imaging software to form new tools and platforms."
One of Foster's clients, Nanotech America, Inc., imports atomic force microscopes for the U.S. and Canadian markets from NT-MDT, a leading Russian designer and manufacturer of next-gen nanotechnology tools. "AFM is THE technology for nanotech and NT-MDT leads the field with modular and hybrid tools for nanoscience," Foster said.
She notes that these devices and their derivative tools are enabling new directions in multi-discipline nanoresearch in Russia and other key labs in the world. As a result, Putin has tapped Dr. Victor Bykov, NT-MDT's founder, as a commercial advisor to push nanoscience initiatives in Russia. "From our interactions with Victor, we've learned about Russia's aggressive nanotech building program. For example, Dr. Bykov was a key speaker at the 2005 inauguration of the Center of Nanotechnology and Institute for NanoPetrography in Khanty-Mansiysk, a gorgeous glass and steel building with very high security, located in the frozen heart of Siberia."
NT-MDT's Nanotech Instruments - Available from Nanotech America
Two key NTMDT microscopes embody the new directions in nano-level analysis. The NTegra Spectra marries Raman spectroscopy to AFM, and NTegra TOMO unites AFM with microtomy. These two devices also offer a glimpse into how Russian nanotechnologists define their growing need for convergent capabilities.
Let's take a detailed look:

24 апреля в Москве состоялась Международная конференция "Перспективы создания трансконтинентальной магистрали через Берингов пролив", посвященная обсуждению проекта создания Трансконтинентальной магистрали (ТКМ): Якутск - Магадан - Анадырь - Уэлен (Россия) - Ном - Фэрбенкс - Британская Колумбия (Северная Америка) с тоннелем под Беринговым проливом. О перспективах строительства магистрали - американский экономист и политический деятель Линдон Ларуш.

The intention to create a trans-Siberian rail system, implicitly extended, across the Bering Strait, to North America, dates implicitly from the visit of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev to the 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The defeat of Lord Palmerston's scheme for destroying the United States, by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's leadership, spread the influence of what was called The American System of political-economy into Russia, as also the Germany reforms under Bismarck, the industrialization of Japan, and elsewhere. These global, so-called geopolitical developments of the post-1865-1876 interval, have been the focal issue of all of the spread of great wars throughout the world from the British orchestration of the first war of Japan against China, in 1894-95, until the 1945 death of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.
Throughout the ebbs and flows of global economic and geo-political history, up the present day, the realization of Mendeleyev's intentions for the development of Russia remains a crucial feature of that continuing history of the post-1865-1876 world to the present moment. The revival of the intention launched by him, now, is presently renewed as a crucial quality of included feature of crucial importance for the world as a whole today.
The same impulse toward new world wars persists in new guises today. At the present moment, the world is gripped by what threatens to be, very soon, the greatest global monetary-financial collapse in the entirety of modern history to date. The spread of warfare and related conflict out of Southwest Asia is nothing other than a reflection of the same, continuing, so-called geo-political impulse which has prompted all of the world's major wars since the 1763 Treaty of Paris, but, more emphatically, the rise of the U.S.A.'s 1865-76 challenge to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal monetary-system.
This onrushing collapse of the world's presently hyper-inflated, disintegrating world monetary-financial system, requires early concerted emergency action by responsible leading nations. A sudden change in U.S. political trends, back to the traditions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, is urgently needed for this purpose. Such a change in U.S. policy must be realized through emergency cooperation which would be led by a concert of leading world powers. These must include the U.S.A., Russia, China, and India, as the rallying-point for a new, spreading partnership among perfectly sovereign nation-state economies. In such cooperation, the development of a great network of modern successors to old forms of rail transport, must be spread across continental Eurasia, and across the Bering Strait into the Americas. The economically efficient development of presently barren and otherwise forbidding regions in entry into the urgently needed future development of the planet as a whole.
Such a plan was already crafted, during 1990-1992, under the direction of my wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who remains the principal political and cultural leader among my associates in Europe and beyond. This perspective must now be revived to become a global actuality.
Technologically, the leading thrust of scientific development is located in the succession of the work of such exemplary figures as Mendeleyev and Academician V.I. Vernadsky, and the work of the relevant, but too little heralded leader in the same field, the American pioneer William Draper Harkins.
This requires the creation of long-term diplomatic agreements among nations, creating a new system of relatively fixed-exchange-rate treaty-agreements, at very low prime interest-rates, over forward-looking intervals of between a quarter to half century. These present periods covering the economic-financial half-life-span of principal long-term investments in the development of that basic economic infrastructure which the needs of the present and coming generations of the peoples of these natures require.
We have thus entered a time, measured by the clock of nuclear-fission and thermonuclear power's development, when the long history of the domination over the land-masses of the planet by actually or implicitly imperial maritime powers, is no longer an acceptable practical proposition. Instead, the science-driven, capital-intensive mode of development of the basic economic infrastructure and standard of living of the populations, will dominate any successful form of civilized development of relations among the sovereign nations of the planet. To this end, the tundras and deserts of our planet must be conquered by the forces of science-driven technological development of the increased productive powers of labor. Development must now proceed from the Arctic rim, southwards, toward Antarctica.
The bridging of the Bering Strait becomes, thus, now, the navel of a new birth of a new world economy.

ВЦ МГУ им. М.В.Ломоносова и Межведомственный суперкомпьютерный центр РАН представили шестую редакцию списка самых мощных компьютеров СНГ Тор50. Суперкомпьютер МВС-15000ВМ в МСЦ РАН, удерживавший первое место в течение полутора лет, уступил суперкомпьютеру "СКИФ Cyberia" компании "Т-Платформы" в Томском государственном университете и занял вторую позицию.

The computing center of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Science (MSTS RAN) have issued the sixth edition of Top50, a list of the most powerful supercomputers in the CIS.
For the first time since the existence of the rating, the total real system performance on the Linpack benchmark has doubled over a half a year period, reaching 45.8 TFlops. 7 from 13 new systems appeared in the sixth edition are among the top 10.
MSTS RAN's MVS-15000VM supercomputer, which was topping the list during 1.5 years, has given way to a new leader, SKIF Cyberia from T-Platforms with real performance of 9 TFlops installed in Tomsk State University. MSTS RAN's IBM PowerPC-based supercomputer with real performance of 6.7 TFlops is on the second place. The next three systems are an HP supercomputer at MSTS RAN with real performance of 4.8 TFlops, Sberbank's supercomputer with 3 TFlops performance and a supercomputer with peak performance of 2.2 TFlops located in the Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine, which was built by a Ukrainian developer Entry.

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