Life Sciences and Chemistry

In what is believed to be the first success of its kind, researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University have cloned a white-tailed deer. A fawn, named “Dewey,” after Duane Kraemer, one of the researchers, was born to a surrogate mother several months ago.

The fawn is believed to be the first successfully cloned deer and Texas A&M is the first academic institution in the world to have cloned five different species. Previously, researchers at the College of Veterina

When introduced to the world in 1998, human embryonic stem cells were considered heralds of a new age of transplant medicine. The prospect of an unlimited supply of cells and tissue of all kinds to treat disease captured public imagination and enthusiasm.

But lost in the glitz of the cells’ potential to treat an array of devastating and sometimes fatal diseases was another quality that, when all is said and done, could match even the prospect of remaking transplant technology.

A group of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute has identified a small synthetic molecule that can induce a cell to undergo dedifferentiation – to move backwards developmentally from its current state to form its own precursor cell.
This compound, named reversine, causes cells which are normally programmed to form muscles to undergo reverse differentiation – retreat along their differentiation pathway and turn into precursor cells.

These precursor cells are multipotent; that

Size matters, and colder temperatures make things bigger! This is true not just for most large furry animals and for birds, but also for the microscopic plants and animals that are at the base of the ocean’s food chain.

Scientists have long known that animals and plants are usually larger when they grow in colder environments. Now, for the first time David Atkinson, Ben Ciotti, and David Montagnes, from the University of Liverpool’s School of Biological Sciences, have found that this o

Biologists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research have demonstrated that desert dust promotes the growth of algae. Scientists had already assumed that the iron in desert dust stimulated algal growth, but this has now been demonstrated for the first time. The researchers have published their findings in the December issue of the Journal of Phycology.

The biologists cultured two species of diatoms in seawater originating from the iron-depleted Southern Ocean, the sea around the

This year, Roderick MacKinnon was recognized for working out the atomic structure of an ion channel and Peter Agre for discovering that a major protein found in red blood cells functions primarily as a water channel. Agre went on to establish the family of related channels, which he named “aquaporins.” Solving the structure of these channels provided a platform for exploring the underlying molecular mechanisms that allow the proteins to function as filters and maintain osmotic equilibrium. Robert Str