Life Sciences and Chemistry

Scientists have finally laid hands on the first member of a recalcitrant group of proteins called the Wnts two decades after their discovery. Important regulators of animal development, these proteins were suspected to have a role in keeping stem cells in their youthful, undifferentiated state – a suspicion that has proven correct, according to research carried out in two laboratories at Stanford University Medical Center. The ability to isolate Wnt proteins could help researchers grow some types of

Contrary to prevailing wisdom concerning one of the most famous textbook examples of a tightly co-evolved mutualism, not every fig species is pollinated by its own unique wasp species. In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Drude Molbo, postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and collaborators report that two genetically distinct species of wasps are present in at least half of the fig species surveyed.

This new result forces a major

The genome sequence of the bread mold Neurospora crassa has been revealed by a group of 77 researchers from seven nations, among them Prof. Oded Yarden of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences.

The achievement, reported in the current issue of Nature magazine, represents a further stage in the history of research on this fungus. A half-century ago, George W. Beadle and Edward L. Tatum won a Nobel Prize for their work on

New research dismisses a widely held assumption about how cells grow

Research published today in Journal of Biology challenges an assumption about cell growth that underpins modern cellular biology. Ian Conlon and Martin Raff, of University College London, show that mammalian cells do not regulate their size in the way scientists have assumed they do since the 1970s.
Conlon and Raff conducted a series of experiments, using Schwann cells from the sciatic nerve of rats, to establish

Researchers compare reproduction rates in North Atlantic whales with genetic variation

A recent study focusing on the humpback whales of the Gulf of Maine revealed that differences in reproductive success of whale mothers may play a significant role in changing genetic variation in the population, according to scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the American Museum of Natural History and their collaborators. Specifically, certain maternal lines of whales have prod

Duke University chemists have developed a method of growing one-atom-thick cylinders of carbon, called “nanotubes,” 100 times longer than usual, while maintaining a soda-straw straightness with controllable orientation. Their achievement solves a major barrier to the nanotubes’ use in ultra-small “nanoelectronic” devices, said the team’s leader.

The researchers have also grown checkerboard-like grids of the tubes which could form the basis of nanoscale electronic devices.