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Eat, Drink and Be Merry (but Not Too Much)

Ian Hamilton In the News PLOS ONE

For those who celebrated the holiday season and the publication of a high quality sequence of the Pinot Noir grape genome in PLoS ONE with rather more wine than mistletoe and who are now feeling the consequences of their festive excesses, help is at hand.

In a paper entitled "A Ribosomal S-6 Kinase–Mediated Signal to C/EBP-? Is Critical for the Development of Liver Fibrosis" published in PLoS ONE on December 26, a study led by Martina Buck of the University of California, San Diego, found that some liver damage caused by heavy alcohol consumption or hepatitis may be halted or even reversed by the blocking of a protein called RSK, which is critical for the progression of liver fibrosis. There is currently no treatment available for liver fibrosis and it is hoped that these findings will be important in future research in this area.

Buck's paper is freely available in full in PLoS ONE and you can read the press release issued by UCSD here. The paper has already garnered a lot of media coverage, including the following articles:

On a lighter note, Riccardo Velasco's Pinot Noir grape genome paper is still receiving attention: Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log ranked the headline of an article about the paper in The Economist as its favourite "translinguistic pun" of the holiday season (Unleash the War on Terroir). Brian Dilkes, the Academic Editor of the paper, meanwhile, discussed the paper with CBS and you can listen online to the entertaining interview, which was featured on a syndicated Westwood One radio network programme. As Miles Raymond said, “Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression.”

See also Larry Moran's blog for a comparison of the genome sequenced in PLoS ONE with the grapevine genome sequence published in Nature in September.

Happy New Year to everyone; I hope that some of you will make it a New Year's resolution to read and rate or discuss one of the many papers published in PLoS ONE over the past year!

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