This week’s Nature celebrates the 300th birthday of the father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus. A series of features celebrates -- and inquires about the future of -- his legacy.
One in particular addresses the future of taxonomy itself in the age of informatics, another speaks to modern taxonomy and conservation, and yet another discusses the effects of sequencing on evolutionary biology's workhouse, phylogenetic classification. Researchers at Dana-Farber have identified a new BRCA2-binding protein, PALB2, showing that it is mutant in a large number of cases of familial breast cancer among Finnish people.
Finally, Erik Wilker and Michael Yaffe at MIT showed that the protein 14-3-3, known to function in cancer prevention, is also a critical regulator of translation during mitosis. Also of intrigue, a book review of Martyn Amos's Genesis Machines: The New Science of Biocomputing focuses on the interplay of computing and biochemistry, as the book's main tenet is that the biochemistry of DNA could be controlled, and in the process, viewed as a computation.