How did early primordial cells evolve?

Four billion years ago, soon after the planet cooled enough for life to begin, primordial cells may have replicated and divided without protein machinery or cell walls, relying instead on just a flimsy lipid membrane. New ...

Gene network illuminates stress, mutation and adaptation responses

For much of her professional life, Dr. Susan Rosenberg has studied the puzzling response of bacteria to stress and the mutations that result. In the current issue of the journal Science, she puts together the pieces of that ...

Mutation breaks HIV's resistance to drugs

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can contain dozens of different mutations, called polymorphisms. In a recent study an international team of researchers, including MU scientists, found that one of those mutations, called ...

How cells' sensing hairs are made

(PhysOrg.com) -- Body cells detect signals that control their behavior through tiny hairs on the cell surface called cilia. Serious diseases and disorders can result when these cilia do not work properly. New research from ...

It doesn't add up

An important new finding by Harvard researchers indicates that cellular mutations responsible for an organism’s successful adaptation do not, when combined over time, provide as much benefit as they would individually ...

Hereditary neurodegeneration linked to ADP-ribose modification

Attaching chains of the small molecule ADP-ribose to proteins is important for a cell's survival and the repair of DNA damage, making this process a promising target for the development of new cancer drugs. Researchers have ...

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