Life Sciences and Chemistry

RNA, often thought of as merely the chemical messenger that helps decode DNA’s genetic instructions for making proteins, can itself play a crucial role in regulating protein expression. Not surprisingly, this regulation occurs through proteins that bind to RNA. All cells in the body, especially nerve cells in the brain, use and regulate RNA in an exquisite fashion.

Scientists have previously shown that defects in RNA binding underlie several human brain disorders, but their RNA targets

Researchers have used ultraviolet light to “weld” a key regulatory protein to its RNA targets, creating a new tool that can be used to identify novel proteins involved in a variety of human diseases.

Using this technique, the researchers have identified an array of RNA molecules regulated by the RNA-binding protein, Nova, which has been implicated in an autoimmune neurodegenerative disease. The researchers believe their technique may help in finding the RNA targets of other proteins involved

Super squirrel moms provide silver spoon beginnings

If they could, many women would likely take a page out of the red squirrel’s book. The northern animal can not only decide when its babies are born in the season but how many brothers and sisters will be in a litter, according to new research by University of Alberta scientists.

But not all female squirrels have these “super mom” capabilities whose genes are wired with these traits–there are “dud moms” in the population as

Researchers have developed powerful new techniques to see in unprecedented detail how blood-forming cells develop in zebrafish. The scientists have used this system to transplant blood cells with fluorescent “tags” so they can observe how the cells restore the blood system in mutant zebrafish that do not have any red blood cells.

The techniques may be helpful in learning how bone marrow transplants reconstitute the immune systems of patients whose immune cells have been destroyed by chemothe

For more than a century, scientists have concluded that a species evolves or adapts by going through an infinite number of small genetic changes over a long period of time.

However, a team of researchers, including a Michigan State University plant biologist, has provided new evidence that an alternate theory is actually at work, one in which the process begins with several large mutations before settling down into a series of smaller ones.

The research is published in the Nov. 12 i

Hummingbirds visited nearly 70 times more often after scientists altered the color of a kind of monkeyflower from pink – beloved by bees but virtually ignored by hummingbirds – to a hummer-attractive yellow-orange.

Researchers writing in the Nov. 13 issue of Nature say perhaps it was a major change or two, such as petal color, that first forged the fork in the evolutionary road that led to today’s species of monkeyflowers that are attractive to and pollinated by hummingbirds and separat