Competition and conflict between males and females start inside the egg in some species, say scientists.
Birds, butterflies, and snakes have a genetic war between the sexes that influences the way they evolve, according to a new theory published in the April 7 issue of the journal Science.
“Genetic conflict is of great interest in evolutionary biology,” explained first author Paige M. Miller. Miller is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and
Brown University geologists have created the longest continuous record of ocean surface temperatures, dating back 5 million years. The record shows slow, steady cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific, a finding that challenges the notion that the Ice Ages alone sparked a global cooling trend. Results are published in Science.
Using chemical clues mined from ocean mud, Brown University researchers have generated the longest continuous record of ocean temperatures on Earth.
A team led by physicists at the University of California, San Diego has shown the feasibility of a fast, inexpensive technique to sequence DNA as it passes through tiny pores. The advance brings personalized, genome-based medicine closer to reality.
The paper, published in the April issue of the journal Nano Letters, describes a method to sequence a human genome in a matter of hours at a potentially low cost, by measuring the electrical perturbations generated by a single stran
New discovery could help improve some forms of chemotherapy
The study is being published in an advance online version of the journal Molecular Cell.
The research looked at XPB helicase from an archaea, a single cell organism similar to bacteria. Helicases are enzymes that unwind or separate the strands of the nucleic acid double helix, an action that is critical to transcription and nucleotide excision repair (NER), as well as other cell processes.
“XPB was initial
Dr. David Bentley (University of Colorado School of Medicine) and colleagues have developed a new, unified model for transcription termination by RNA Poymerase II. Over the years, research into the mechanism of poly(A) site-dependent transcription termination has generated two different models: the allosteric and the torpedo models.
The allosteric, or antiterminator, model proposes that transcription of the poly(A) site triggers conformational changes that destabilize the elongating RN
A researcher at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech is developing a database and computational tools to help scientists learn more about how certain genes in tomatoes affect the crop’s flavor and nutritional value.
The Tomato Metabolite Database, which is being implemented by Zhangjun Fei, a senior bioinformatics scientist in VBI’s Cyberinfrastructure Group, will be used to store a wide range of information and data about tomato, including microarray and
Biochemists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have made a surprising discovery about the inner workings of a powerful virus – a discovery that they hope could one day lead to better vaccines or anti-virus medications.
Reporting in the April issue of the Journal of Virology, the researchers have identified a protein that plays an important role in the ability of the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) to invade healthy cells and reproduce itself. The finding could play a
Researchers at the Institute of Biotechnology of the University of Helsinki have for the first time identified an internal electron transfer reaction that initiates the proton pump mechanism of the respiratory enzyme. These new results are published in the Thursday (April 6th) issue of Nature.
The functions of the lungs, the blood circulation, and the red blood cells in respiration are only an overture to the physicochemical reaction in the cells where oxygen is reduced to w
The transistor laser, invented by scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been full of surprises. Researchers recently coaxed the device to reveal fundamental properties of the transistor, and of the transistor laser, moving it a step closer to commercialization.
As reported in the April 3 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Nick Holonyak Jr., Milton Feng, and colleagues at the U. of I. explored the current-voltage relationship in a transist
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have added a gene in the bacterium Salmonella to the short list of genes regulated by a new mechanism known as the riboswitch.
The Salmonella riboswitch is the first to sense and respond to a metal ion, substantially expanding the types of molecules that riboswitches can detect to help cells assess and react to their environment.
First identified in 2002, riboswitches sense when a protein is needed an
A pair of supermassive black holes in the distant universe are intertwined and spiraling toward a merger that will create a single super-supermassive black hole capable of swallowing billions of stars, according to a new study by astronomers at the University of Virginia, Bonn University and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
The study appears in the April 6, 2006 issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Black holes are among the oldest regions of the univer
An international team of astronomers today is reporting on a discovery of a star exploding inside another star. The discovery is helping astronomers learn more about the structure of a red giant star, how shock waves move through a star and revealing how one type of binary star system goes through the end stages of its life, the astronomers report.
Speaking at the National Astronomy Meeting in Leicester, U.K., the international team of 14 astronomers described what they saw
Bird Flu and Chikungunya – we have all heard about it in the media. But is there a reason to be frightened and how big is the risk for you to catch these diseases in reality?
On 6 April the COST Office in Brussels organised a seminar on Bird Flu and Chikungunya, both viral infections of different kinds. Professor Marc van Ranst, the leading expert in this field from the University of Leuven informed the seminar about these two diseases and the actual risks that they represent fo
Each year, over 300,000 people die of African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the Free University of Brussels are making strides in the battle against this disease. They have coupled the human protein ApoL-1 with a nanobody in order to very specifically eliminate the infection caused by the pathogenic parasites, against which our defense mechanism is powerless. Tests on mice are already promising. The r
VLT FORS Image of the Inner Parts of the Tarantula Nebula
Hanging above the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) – one of our closest galaxies – in what some describe as a frightening sight, the Tarantula nebula is worth looking at in detail. Also designated 30 Doradus or NGC 2070, the nebula owes its name to the arrangement of its brightest patches of nebulosity that somewhat resemble the legs of a spider. This name, of the biggest spiders on the Earth, is also very fitting in view of the
This year, spring is so late that the global climate warming is hardly believable. Is it applicable to Russia? Probably the fact is that weather cataclysms and anomalies are now occuring more and more frequently, and warm autumn gets balanced by frosts and cold spring? Phenologists from the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology of Rosgidromet (Hydrometeorological Committee), Russian Academy of Sciences, decided to find out what was happening in reality in European part of Russia, and analyzed obs
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