Maybe you really are what you eat. This would solve the long-time mystery of why so many of Guam’s Chamorro people – up to a third per village — suffered a devastating neurological disease. A new study suggests that they gorged on flying fox bats that in turn had feasted on neurotoxin-laden cycad seeds.
“Through the consumption of cycad-fed flying foxes, the Chamorro people may have unwittingly ingested large quantities of cycad neurotoxins,” say Clark Monson of the University of Hawaii,
A group of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has solved structures of a bacterial protein called pilin, which is required for infection by pathogens that cause human diseases like meningitis, gonorrhea, diarrheal diseases, pneumonia, and cholera.
In the latest issue of the journal Molecular Cell, the TSRI group reports two key structures of these pilins and discoveries about their assembly into fibrous “pili.” Because a whole class of bacterial pathogens require the ass
Mice without Fkbp6 gene have significantly reduced testes, completely lack sperm cells
A gene that belongs to a family of genes implicated in heart disease has been found to be essential for male fertility but has no impact on female fertility, researchers at U of T, along with colleagues in New York and Japan, have discovered.
“This gene – Fkbp6 – is a member of a family of genes that have been implicated in immunosuppression and heart disease,” says Dr. Josef Penninger, pr
Butterfly flight simulator sheds light on epic migration
During their winter migration to Mexico, monarch butterflies depend on an internal clock to help them navigate in relation to the sun, scientists have found.
By studying monarchs inside a specially designed flight simulator, the researchers have gathered what they believe is the first direct evidence of the essential role of the circadian clock in celestial navigation. The study appears in the journal Science, publishe
The identification and duplication of a gene that controls production of plants’ outermost protective coating may allow Purdue University researchers to create crops with increased drought resistance.
Scientists cloned the gene WAX2 after they discovered a fast-wilting mutant of Arabidopsis, a commonly used experimental plant. The gene is directly associated with the synthesis of the protective layer of plants, called the cuticle, and its contained waxes, according to the study publ
A study of a common wild mouse by two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists has found evidence of dramatic evolutionary change in a span of just 150 years, suggesting genetic evolution can occur a lot faster than many had thought possible.
The findings are the first report of such quick evolution in a mammal and appear in the May 22 issue of the journal Nature.
Oliver Pergams, a conservation biology researcher with the Chicago Zoological Society in Brookfield, Ill. and visiting
Almost every week we hear of a new genome sequence being completed, yet turning sequence information into knowledge about what individual genes do is very difficult. An article published in Journal of Biology this week will simplify this task, as it describes a new online tool that dramatically improves predictions of how individual genes are regulated. Dr. Wyeth Wasserman and his team have created this powerful new two-step method for identifying which regulators of gene expression, called
Feeding birds display similar habits to human consumers shopping for food, according to research published in the current edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
A two-year study has discovered it is possible to influence hummingbirds’ choice of food by changing the options available to them, in the same way supermarkets can manipulate customers’ preferences by clever positioning of products.
The study is published in the current edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society
Using a laser range-finder, neurobiologists have scanned real-life scenes to gather millions of distance measurements to surfaces in each scene — analyzing the mass of data to explain a series of long-known but little-understood quirks in how people judge distances.
The measurements reveal, for example, that the tendency of people to estimate the distance of isolated objects as being six to 12 feet away arises because that is the average distance of actual objects and surfaces in the visual
University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have discovered four new kingdoms of life in the high alpine environment of Colorado, findings that have potential applications in the fields of agriculture and global change.
Doctoral student Allen Meyer and Professor Steven Schmidt of the environmental, population and organismic biology department discovered the new microbe kingdoms in barren, boulder-filled tundra slopes west of Boulder.
At altitudes of 11,000 feet to 13,000 feet in
An Oxford University study has found a gene which predisposes people to asthma and atopy, a form of hypersensitivity which causes allergies. This discovery, published on Sunday [18 May] online in nature genetics, has the potential to lead to better classification of asthma and to new treatments.
Asthma affects one child in seven in the UK and there are 155 million cases of the disease in the world today. Asthma and allergies run strongly in families and have a genetic basis.
Funded
The production of lariat RNAs is a key step in the biologically important process of splicing. Because splicing changes the protein that is made from a given gene, a fundamental understanding of splicing is critical for comprehending the connections between genes and proteins. The study of splicing, however, has been very difficult in part because lariat RNAs have been nearly impossible to make artificially.
Now, chemistry professor Scott K. Silverman and graduate student Yangming Wang at th
A bacteria-killing virus found in the feces of some sheep could help remove the dangerous foodborne bacteria Escherichia coli O157:H7 from livestock. Researchers from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington present their research today at the 103rd General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
“Here we report a promising new natural way of reducing pathogen concentrations in livestock. This takes advantage of bacteriophages – bacteria-killing viruses, harmless to humans a
The apparent increase in marine biodiversity over the past 50 million to 100 million years is real and not just a false reading produced by the inconsistencies of the fossil record, says a team of paleontologists led by the University of Chicago’s David Jablonski. This finding, published in the May 16 issue of the journal Science, may help scientists place the future of global biodiversity in its proper context. “If you want to understand what’s going to come in the future you need
As scientists create molecular complexes to perform increasingly minute operations — such as molecular level switches or memory devices — it is critical that the association forces that hold the molecular components together be accurately understood.
But measurements of association constants are often not accurate, according to an article by Virginia Tech Ph.D. student Jason Jones and chemistry professor Harry W. Gibson, published in May 15, 2003 online issue of the Journal of the America
The gene for an enzyme that is key to natural disease resistance in plants has been discovered by biologists at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI) and at Cornell University. The researchers say that by enhancing the activity of the enzyme they might be able to boost natural disease resistance in crop plants without resorting to pesticides or the introduction of non-plant genes.
The research, reported in the latest (May 16) issue of the journal Cell , describes the discov
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