In Science this week, investigators from Nagoya University report data suggesting that it was modification, rather than loss, that resulted in modern day insects lacking wings on certain body regions. Insects today have wings exclusively on the second and third thoracic segments, yet insect fossil records show wing-like pads on other segments. Using RNA interference to silence genes responsible for specific body segment identities, the researchers found that the mealworm beetle was capable of growing wing-like structures on the first thoracic region. The findings indicate that insects did not lose their ability to grow wings in other areas of their bodies, but that modification "provided an additional diversifying mechanism of insect body plan," the researchers write.

Also in Science, a multi-institute team led by Harvard University researchers show that the accumulation of multiple mutations associated with a single gene, as opposed to a single mutation with widespread effects, are responsible for the coat colors of deer mice. When studying a gene known to influence hair color, the scientists found that a variety of genetic variants associated with light coloration were under selection, suggesting that local adaptation results from "independent selection on many mutations within a single locus, each with a specific effect on an adaptive phenotype, thereby minimizing pleiotropic consequences."

Meanwhile, in Science Translational Medicine, a group of scientists and healthcare experts write that while molecular diagnostics are expected to improve healthcare by enabling providers to optimize treatment selection, regulatory and reimbursement challenges threaten to hinder their development and integration into the healthcare system. They propose a variety of changes to existing statutory and regulatory policies and strategies that may help overcome these hurdles.

Yang Wei is taking over the National Natural Science Foundation of China, which experienced a large budget increase during his predecessor's tenure, and Yang tells ScienceInsider that the agency expects to see further growth. "Although increases will be less dramatic than in the past 9 years, we still anticipate growth rates higher than China's GDP growth rate [forecast to be 7.5 percent in 2013]," Yang says. Still, he notes that the NSFC budget is 40 percent the size of the US National Science Foundation budget and that one division of the agency competes with the US National Institutes of Health.

At the same time, Yang says he is working to promote research integrity and to improve agency operations. He tells ScienceInsider that an independent research integrity committee has identified five areas of misconduct — credential inflation, plagiarism, assigning favorable reviewers to certain applications, leakage of review information, and submitting false progress reports — that the agency is keeping watch on.

In Nature this week, an international team of researchers present an analysis of tapeworm genome sequences that has uncovered a variety of potential targets for fighting the parasites. Using three human-infective tapeworm species and one lab model, the scientists uncovered gene losses and gains related to the animal’s adaptation to the host environment, such as ones involved in nutrient metabolism, which relates to their ability to absorb nutrients from their hosts. The work revealed new areas for therapeutic intervention, including ones for which existing drugs may be effective.

Our sister publication GenomeWeb Daily News has more on this study here.

Meantime, in Nature Biotechnology, researchers from Harvard University report on a new method to produce siRNAs in Escherichia coli, rather than through chemical synthesis. The technique involves the expression of p19, an siRNA-binding protein found in plant RNA viruses, in E. coli, which stabilizes an 21 nucleotide-long siRNA species produces by the bacterial RNase III. When mammalian cells are transfected with them, siRNAs that were generated in bacteria expressing p19 and a hairpin RNA encoding 200 or more nucleotides of a target gene reproducibly knock down target gene expression by around 90 percent without immunogenicity or off-target effects.

The sad and sobering tale of how allegedly fabricated results of research led by a Johns Hopkins University lab led to the suicide of a scientist in Taiwan,and the dismissal of the man who blew the whistle, are the focus of a feature in yesterday's Washington Post.

The story is the tale of Daniel Yuan, formerly a genetics researcher in Jeff Boeke's lab at Hopkins. For years, Yuan suggested that data being generated in the lab's studies of gene interactions in yeast were suspicious.

Yuan was dismissed from Hopkins in 2011, and last summer one of the members of the research team, Yu-yi Lin, was found dead in his new lab in Taiwan of an apparent suicide.

Lin was an author of a paper published in Nature last year that now, according to the Washington Post, may soon be corrected by the journal. At age 38, Lin left behind a wife and three daughters.

The article suggests that Yuan was fired because of his concerns that the data that was used to write the Nature paper and others did not support the conclusions reported. Yuan also reached out to the editors at Nature, warning the journal of the weakness of the data behind the paper, saying that its results were overstated and that some of the analyses outlined in the paper may not have been conducted at all.

After Lin was found dead, Yuan received an e-mail "essentially blaming him for driving Lin to suicide," the Post reports.

The Post feature also suggests that the saga of Yuan and Lin are part of a larger trend of falsified research and unfounded research conclusions being published because of the immense pressure caused by an increasing number of scientists who are racing to win grants in an environment of diminishing funding.

HeLa cells are ubiquitous in biomedical research — indeed, there have even been reports of HeLa cells contaminating and taking over other cell lines in the lab. By sequencing and transcriptomic analyses, researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and University Hospital Heidelberg report in G3: Genes, Genomes and Genetics that a number of pathways in HeLa cells "exhibit significantly different expression patterns from those in normal human tissues."

The researchers, led by EMBL's Lars Steinmetz, performed DNA and RNA sequencing of a HeLa Kyoto cell line and examined its mutational profile and gene expression levels, finding about 4.5 million SNVs and half a million indels. The cell line also exhibits an extensive amount of chromosomal rearrangements to the point of chromothripsis, the researchers add. In addition, about 2,000 genes are expressed at a higher level in the HeLa cell line than in normal tissue, and those genes appear to mainly be involved in proliferation, transcription, and DNA repair. "The high expression of some DNA repair genes, some of which also carry potentially damaging NS mutations, suggests that even though HeLa displays high chromosomal instability, specific DNA repair mechanisms may be activated, perhaps irrespective of their effectiveness," the researchers write.

"Our study underscores the importance of accounting for the abnormal characteristics of HeLa cells in experimental design and analysis, and has the potential to refine the use of HeLa cells as a model of human biology," Steinmetz adds in a statement.