Life Sciences
The results of a new study suggest that bacteria that cause diseases like bubonic plague and serious gastric illness can turn the genes that make them infectious on or off.
Knowing how disease-causing bacteria, like Yersinia pestis and E. coli, do this may one day help scientists create drugs that control the expression of these genes, thereby making the bacteria harmless, said Vladimir Svetlov, a study co-author and a research associate in microbiology at Ohio State University. The findings appear in the April 13 issue of the journal Molecular Cell.
Gene expression – the process of turning…
Up to 15 percent of couples of childbearing age struggle with the heartache of infertility. Now there is the promise of new hope with Cornell researchers' identification of a mutation in a gene that causes male infertility in mice. Because this is the first time that a dominant mutation that leads specifically to infertility in a mammal has been discovered, the researchers say they can now look for similar mutations in the DNA of infertile men.
"If you consider infertility a disease, you can't study it like you would other diseases, because the affected people can't reproduce," said John…
University of Oregon scientists have identified molecular features that determine the light-emitting ability green fluorescent proteins, and by strategically inserting a single oxygen atom they were able to keep the lights turned off for up to 65 hours.
The findings, published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, likely are applicable to most photoswitchable fluorescent proteins, said S. James Remington, professor of physics and member of the UO Institute of Molecular Biology.
Graphic shows models of the on and off structural alignments of a…
Starting to breed late in life is a bad idea if you want to maximise the number of offspring that you produce - or so the theory goes.
But doubt has now been cast on this hypothesis - one of the biggest assumptions in behavioural ecology - by researchers from the universities of Bristol and Cape Town and published today in Current Biology.
Green woodhoopoes are a cooperative bird species that live in year-round, residential groups of 2-12 individuals in which only one pair breeds per season. The remaining individuals help to raise the offspring of the dominant pair, while waiting to breed…
Given the choice, many of us would opt for warmer climes during the bleak midwinter. However, most of us cannot afford to move abroad for a few months, so instead we pile on extra layers of clothing to keep warm. Arthropods face much the same dilemma, as they cannot migrate long distances to avoid low winter temperatures – so why are they not killed off by the cold? Dr Melody Clark, from the British Antarctic Survey, will present data on the fascinating ways two species of these animals combat the cold on Tuesday 3rd April at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow…
Tree frogs have the unique ability to stick to smooth surfaces even when they are tilted well beyond the vertical - some small tree frogs can even adhere when completely upside down. Conversely when walking or jumping they can detach their toe pads easily. Researchers from the University of Glasgow will present insights into how this fascinating ability is controlled at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow, UK.
“The toe pads of tree frogs are coated with a thin mucus which adhere to surfaces by wet adhesion, like wet tissue paper sticking to glass. The process by…
The ribosome is the protein-producing nanomachine in cells that keeps the human body cranking along. A discovery by University of Maryland researchers has provided a clue that could lead to programming the ribosome to fight viruses like HIV AIDS and SARS.
In the March 23 issue of the journal Molecular Cell, University of Maryland biology professor Jonathan Dinman and research assistant professor Artural Meskauskas describe how their discovery of the function of some long protein finger-like structures in the ribosome could lead to new antiviral therapies in the near future.
This picture…
Researchers at Purdue University and The Catholic University of America have discovered the structure of an enzyme essential for the operation of "molecular motors" that package DNA into the head segment of some viruses during their assembly.
The enzyme, called an ATPase, provides energy to run the motor needed to insert DNA into the capsid, or head, of the T4 virus, which is called a bacteriophage because it infects bacteria. The same kind of motor, however, also is likely present in other viruses, including the human herpes virus.
This image depicts the structure of the T4 virus, called a…
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and their colleagues have found that mice simply expressing a human light receptor in addition to their own can acquire new color vision, a sign that the brain can adapt far more rapidly to new sensory information than anticipated.
This work, appearing March 23 in Science, also suggests that when the first ancestral primate inherited a new type of photoreceptor more than 40 million years ago, it probably experienced immediate color enhancement, which may have allowed this trait to spread quickly.
"If you gave mice a new sensory input at…
Researchers have identified a novel gene mutation that causes X-linked mental retardation for which there was no previously known molecular diagnosis, according to an article to be published electronically on Tuesday, March 20, 2007 in The American Journal of Human Genetics.
Investigators F. Lucy Raymond (Cambridge Institute of Medical Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK) and Patrick S. Tarpey (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hixton, UK) describe the ZDHHC9 gene found in those with severe retardation as being mutated to the point of entirely losing function.
"ZDHHC9 is a…