Virus genes from city pond rescue bacteria

A key question in evolutionary biology is how new functions arise. New research at Uppsala University, Sweden, shows that bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) can contribute to new functions by revealing hidden potential ...

Spider silk: A malleable protein provides reinforcement

Why are the lightweight silk threads of web spiders tougher than most other materials? Scientists from the Universities of Würzburg and Mainz teamed up to find answers to this question. They were able to show that the natural ...

Simplifying genetic codes to look back in time

(Phys.org)— Daisuke Kiga and co-workers at the Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology, together with researchers across Japan, have shown that simpler versions of the ...

Chemicals hitch a ride onto new protein for better compounds

Chemists have developed a powerful new method of selectively linking chemicals to proteins, a major advance in the manipulation of biomolecules that could transform the way drugs are developed, proteins are probed, and molecules ...

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