Life Sciences

It’s almost as if the grape varietal known in the U.S. as Isabella is being hidden, protected, or that the E.U. ban on Fragolino, made from Isabella grapes, is a hint that this North American grape said to have transported the phylloxera to Europe in the early 1800’s, is cursed. Also known in over 50 aliases including Raisin De Cassis, Fragola, Framboisier, Alexander and Black Cape, it is many times mistaken in Italy for the Clinton grape for a variety of reasons, most importantly having to do with its strawberry oriented taste and immunity to the grape killing pest phylloxera. All Native…

Big question this morning! Of course, plenty of philosophers and scientists have wondered about the question of what is life, and the answer has proved more slippery than everyone thought. We all think we know how to tell if something is alive or not, and yet it is remarkably difficult to come up with a precise definition of the concept (just like American Justice Potter Stewart once famously said of pornography). When I was in college, popular definitions of life included things that grow, metabolize and reproduce, although by that definition fire is alive. My professor of biophysics at the…

The victory stance of a gold medalist and the slumped shoulders of a non-finalist are innate and biological rather than learned responses to success and failure, according to a University of British Columbia study using cross-cultural data gathered at the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In the first study of its kind, UBC psychology researcher Jessica Tracy investigated how pride and shame are expressed across cultures, and among the congenitally blind. She compared the non-verbal expressions and body language of sighted, blind, and congenitally blind judo competitors representing more…

New research in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture shows there is no evidence to support the argument that organic food is better than food grown with the use of pesticides and chemicals Many people pay more than a third more for organic food in the belief that it has more nutritional content than food grown with pesticides and chemicals. But the research by Dr Susanne Bügel and colleagues from the Department of Human Nutrition, University of Copenhagen, shows there is no clear evidence to back this up. In the first study ever to look at retention of minerals and trace…

Today epigenetics is all the rage, but it has its roots in a pair of papers that appeared nearly simultaneously in 1952-1953. Luria SE and Human ML. 1952. A nonhereditary, host-induced variation of bacterial viruses. J. Bact. 64: 557-569 and also Bertani G and Weigle JJ. 1953. Host controlled variation in bacterial viruses. J. Bact. 65: 113-121.  Luria & Human and Bertani & Weigle independently discovered that bacterial hosts can affect the growth and phenotypic properties of their bacteriophages. As Luria and Human put it, "In analyzing the relation between certain phages…

The architecture of haematopoiesis – which is the process by which all blood cells originate – is essentially the same throughout the mammal world, report scientists in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. This is an unexpected result considering the thousands of mammals’ species with a myriad of habitats and lifestyles, as so well demonstrated when comparing the 30 mm flying bumblebee bat and the 30 metre-long aquatic blue whale both mammals. But the work now published shows that the variations in the blood system - necessary to adapt to the evolutionary changes found within the mammals’…

A leading fungi expert has accidentally stumbled upon a new species in Scotland – as he walked home from work. Dr Andy Taylor, from Aberdeen’s Macaulay Institute, noticed the Xerocomus bubalinus growing near a lime tree in the city’s Albyn Place. This very rare fungus was only described for the first time in 1991 in the Netherlands, and has not previously been recorded before in Scotland. As well as his city centre find, Dr Taylor, a professional mycologist, also recently discovered a species (Russula vinososordida ) not found in the UK before, and another very rare species (Buchwaldoboletus…

Genetic recombination in germ cells leads to offspring with a new genetic make-up and influences the course of evolution. In the current issue of Nature, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK, have presented the most precise map of genetic recombination yet and they say it sheds light on fundamental questions about genetic shuffling and has implications for the tracking of disease genes and their inheritance. In order to generate germ cells, sexually reproducing…

Dr. Sarah Hake and her colleagues, George Chuck, Hector Candela-Anton, Nathalie Bolduc, Jihyun Moon, Devin O'Connor, China Lunde, and Beth Thompson, have taken advantage of the information from sequenced grass genomes to study how the reproductive structures of maize are formed. Dr. Hake, of the Plant Gene Expression Center, USDA-ARS, who is the 2007 recipient of the Stephen Hales Prize, will be presenting this work at the opening Awards Symposium of the annual meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists in Mérida, Mexico, June 27th. Maize was first domesticated in the highlands of…

Why would humans evolve allergy problems? A team from the Randall Division of Cell & Molecular Biophysics, King's College London are working on a molecule vital to the chicken's immune system which represents the evolutionary ancestor of the human antibodies that cause allergic reactions. Crucially, they have discovered that the chicken molecule behaves quite differently from its human counterpart, which throws light on the origin and cause of allergic reactions in humans and gives hope for new strategies for treatment. The chicken molecule, an antibody called IgY, looks remarkably…