Sturgeon genome sequenced

Sometimes referred to as the "the Methuselah of freshwater fish," sturgeons and their close relatives are very old from an evolutionary point of view. Fossils indicate that sturgeons date back 250 million years and have changed ...

The barley genome unravelled… and it's bigger than yours

(Phys.org)—As part of an international consortium, scientists led by UA plant sciences professor Rod Wing have helped decipher the genetic alphabet of the barley plant. This is the largest plant genome to be sequenced and ...

The entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1 sequenced

For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today's Romania 35,000 years ago. Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa ...

How a mint became catmint

Catmint, also known as catnip, is well-known for its intoxicating effect on cats. The chemical responsible for the cats' strange behavior is nepetalactone, a volatile iridoid produced by catmint. An international team of ...

Psychoactive psilocybin's evolution in magic mushrooms

Psilocybe fungi, known colloquially as "magic mushrooms," have held deep significance in Indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica for centuries. They captured the wider world's attention as a psychedelic staple in the 60s and 70s. ...

Israeli scientists find way to combat forged DNA

Israeli scientists have developed new technology to fight biological identity theft after realising that DNA evidence found at crime scenes can be easily falsified.

Protein coding 'junk genes' may be linked to cancer

By using a new analysis method, researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Sweden have found close to one hundred novel human gene regions that code for proteins. A number of these ...

Mining the botulinum genome

(Norwich BioScience Institutes) Scientists at the Institute of Food Research have been mining the genome of C. botulinum to uncover new information about the toxin genes that produce the potent toxin behind botulism.

The origin of the turtle shell: Mystery solved

A team of RIKEN researchers has finally solved the riddle of how the turtle shell originated. By observing the development of different animal species and confirming their results with fossil analysis and genomic data, researchers ...

Researchers solve mystery of disappearing bird digit

Evolution adds and subtracts, and nowhere is this math more evident than in vertebrates, which are programmed to have five digits on each limb. But many species do not. Snakes, of course, have no digits, and birds have three.

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