Two open access papers published this week in PNAS score for systems biology. Neuroscientists at Yale, Harvard, and the Burnham Institute report that when they implanted undifferentiated human neural stem cells into primates made to show symptoms of Parkinson's disease, some of these cells improved behavior and increased dopamine levels.
In another article, Joe Ecker at The Salk Institute collaborated with researchers at the University of Chicago to find genome-wide patterns of single-feature polymorphisms in Arabidopsis thaliana. They hybridized 23 wild strains of the plant to the ATH1 gene expression array and found 77,420 single-feature polymorphisms with distinct patterns of variation across the genome.