For those who delight in eating Mediterranean anchovies, the taste of inshore varieties has long been preferred to that of the open-sea kind. An IRD researcher has shown that this organoleptic difference coincides with a real biological distinction. In the Mediterranean Sea there is not just one species of European anchovy but two, each occupying its own habitat.
Correspondence analysis was performed of all existing genetic data obtained between 1980 and 1996 concerning anchovies from the M
A team of biologists working in Brazil may have found the clues to resolving the longstanding mystery of why some species of bees, such as honey bees, communicate the location of food with dances in their hives and why other bees simply leave scent trails from the food source to the nest.
In the paper to appear in the October 22nd issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, biologists at the University of California, San Diego and the University of São Paulo report that one species of Bra
For apple maggots, the dating scene is simple — flies only mate on a specific host fruit. Using new technology developed at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Cornell University researchers have demonstrated that this fact of fly life has resulted in the emergence of two distinct races of the pest in just 150 years.
In research published in the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Web site Sept. 22, the scientists show that one mechan
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center investigators report
A line of monkey stem cells, produced without the use of an embryo, has reproduced for more than two years and still retains the capability of differentiating into a variety of tissue types, a research team reports in the current on-line edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Kent Vrana, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center a
A research team co-directed by Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, has dated a human jawbone from a Romanian bear hibernation cave to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago. That makes it the earliest known modern human fossil in Europe.
Other human bones from the same cave — a temporal bone, a facial skeleton and a partial braincase — are still undergoing analysis, but are likely to be the same age. The jawbone was found in February 2002 in Pester
Researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) have taken the first major step toward isolating adult stem cells from mouse skin, having developed a test that confirms the presence and number of stem cells in a given amount of tissue. Until now, such a technique has only existed for isolating adult stem cells found in blood.
“This assay has opened up a whole new avenue of research,” said Ruby Ghadially, MD, SFVAMC staff physician and UCSF associate professor of dermatology. “If
Protein contains both ’on’ and ’off’ switches
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists have discovered a unique protein on the surface membrane of plant cells, one that apparently contains both “on” and “off” molecular switches. Apart from its unique structure, the protein may be the first cell surface membrane receptor ever discovered in plants that regulates a key protein complex involved in cell growth and division. Known as the heterotrimeric G pr
A new, rare fossil of a prehistoric sea creature bearing eyes like “twin towers” sheds light on how it lived more than 395 million years ago, says a University of Alberta researcher.
Dr. Brian Chatterton, one of the world’s leading experts on trilobites and a professor in the U of A’s Faculty of Science, reports on the discovery of the only known complete specimen of a particular trilobite in this week’s edition of the prestigious scientific journal Science.
Trilobi
Studies in zebrafish lead to better understanding of blood formation and leukemia development
Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have isolated a gene responsible for making blood stem cells. The findings appear in today’s issue of the journal Nature. The gene, called cdx4, is responsible for establishing the location of blood cell formation in the developing embryo. Cdx4 works by altering the expression of HOX genes, which are involved in making the body plan. Surpris
Roughly the size of a buffalo, a giant rodent that roamed the banks of an ancient Venezuelan river some 8 million years ago, dining on sea grass and dodging crocodiles, was an evolutionary sibling to modern-day guinea pigs.
The largest rodent that ever lived, Phoberomys pattersoni, weighed about 1,545 pounds (700 kilograms) – more than 10 times the size of today’s rodent heavyweight, the 110-pound (50 kilograms) capybara.
“Imagine a weird guinea pig, but huge, with a long tail fo
Rutgers marine scientists say phytoplankton changed color 250 million years ago
Green was the dominant color for plants both on land and in the ocean until about 250 million years ago when changes in the ocean’s oxygen content – possibly sparked by a cataclysmic event – helped bring basic ocean plants with a red color to prominence – a status they retain today. That’s the view of a group led by marine scientists from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in a paper, “The Evolu
Findings shed light on the role of emotion in human economic interactions
In the first experimental demonstration of its kind, researchers led by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, PhD, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University, and the Living Links Center, have shown nonhuman primates respond negatively to unequal reward distribution, a reaction often seen in humans based on their universal sense of fairness. While researchers have long recognized the sense of
During its growth, an embryo changes shape under the control of the so-called developmental genes. Emmanuel Farge, a researcher at the Institut Curie, lecturer at the Paris VII University, and member of the Institut Universitaire de France, has just shown that mechanical pressure applied to a fly embryo influences the expression of its developmental genes. So not everything is purely genetic and some features of the living cell are also mechano-sensitive.
It remains to be seen whether this
Bacteria are an indiscriminate lot. While most organisms tend to pass their genes on to the next generation of their own species, bacteria often exchange genetic material with totally unrelated species – a process called lateral gene transfer.
That is why skeptics doubted that researchers could ever hope to work out the evolutionary history of bacteria. But now, thanks to the availability of sequenced genomes for groups of related bacteria, and a new analytical approach, researchers at the
How do people subjected to the endless dark days of winter in the far northern latitudes maintain normal daily rhythms? Though many might feel like hibernating, a highly regulated internal system keeps such impractical yearnings in check. From fruit flies to humans, nearly every living organism depends on an internal clock to regulate basic biological cycles such as sleep patterns, metabolism, and body temperature. And that clock runs on similar molecular mechanisms.
Specific clusters of ne
Neurobiologists at Duke University Medical Center have found the strongest evidence yet that monkeys show the same keen “social reflexes” that humans do — shifting their attention in response to the direction of gaze of another individual. The researchers said their findings mean that monkeys can provide a critically important animal model of how the brain controls what humans pay attention to in social situations.
Such a model would enable scientists to better understand how processing of
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