FLICKR, JOHN MARTINEZ PAVLIGALast week, The Scientist reported that Dmitry Kuznetsov, a Russian biochemist with a long history of fraud allegations, had taken the role as chief editor of two new journals launched in 2011. The misconduct accusations against Kuznetsov, if true, amount to “one of the worst fraud records in the history of science,” said Dan Larhammar, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden who has written about problems in Kuznetsov's work. “That should be a major concern to” the publisher that recruited Kuznetsov as editor-in-chief, he said.
This week, Kuznetsov sent reporter Kerry Grens a series of emails between himself and Manisha Basu, an editor at the journals’ publisher, ScienceDomain International, which revealed that Kuznetsov was leaving his posts. Still, the biochemist denies any wrongdoing, even offering explanations for why researchers had been unable to replicate his results or had trouble locating some of the allegedly “missing” papers cited in his publications.
WIKIMEDIA, CDCTwo new studies out this week tell an interesting story about the microbes that inhabit our gastrointestinal tracts: certain microbes in the colon may speed disease progression in HIV patients; and select strains of Clostridium bacteria proved beneficial in mouse models of colitis and allergy. HIV patients on antiretroviral treatment harbored variable gut microbial communities, some quite similar to healthy individuals and others more similar to untreated patients, whose microbiomes harbored a greater proportion of members of the Proteobacteria family and fewer members of Clostridia and Bacteroidia families. Interestingly, the more abnormal a patient’s microbiome, the greater immune cell activity and the higher the levels of inflammatory molecules in their blood. The researchers suspect that viral replication in the mucosa of the intestines can weaken the barrier, allowing the peaceful microbial inhabitants of the gut to leak into the surrounding tissues, causing inflammation and the proliferation of the immune cells that are susceptible to HIV infection.
In the second study, the researchers built on previous findings that germ-free mice treated with a cocktail of a few dozen strains of Clostridia promoted the activity of regulatory T cells (Treg) in the colon, ...
