This Week in Nature: Feb 22, 2007

An editorial comes out swinging against a move by US President Bush to increase presidential authority over funding issues in government agencies. Nature says this will lead to higher chances of worthwhile projects being ignored: "Because deliberations on regulation are open to public scrutiny only after an agency submits its plans to the president's budget office ... they can be smothered at birth inside the agency by the presidential appointee, away from public scrutiny."

Also in the current issue, a genome-wide association study for diabetes gets significant attention. In a paper from lead author Robert Sladek of McGill University, a team of scientists demonstrate a large-scale genotyping project that turned up four loci implicated in risk for type 2 diabetes. And in a commentary from Nelson Freimer and Chiara Sabatti, the authors discuss the rise of genome-wide association studies and the stumbling blocks confronting them.

And a paper out of the University of Washington, Amgen, and HHMI reports on a genome-wide analysis, using chromatin immunoprecipitation arrays, of genes targeted by Foxp3 in T cells.