Plants are DNA hoarders. Adhering to the maxim of never throwing anything out that might be useful later, they often duplicate their entire genome and hang on to the added genetic baggage. All those extra genes are then free ...
Evolution
Jul 19, 2021
0
127
Ever since scientists discovered cells under the microscope more than 350 years ago, they have noted that each type of cell has a characteristic size. From tiny bacteria to inches-long neurons, size matters for how cells ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 10, 2021
1
1424
In an article scheduled to publish in PNAS, on June 7, 2021, a team of researchers led by Columbia University's Dustin R. Rubenstein, a Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, found that within the same ...
Evolution
Jun 7, 2021
0
11
Some Australian desert mammals use distinct strategies to promote evolutionary fitness in response to changing environmental conditions over short timescales, according to a new study.
Evolution
Apr 16, 2024
0
15
As a major driving force of evolution, polyploidy (genome duplication) is ubiquitous across different evolutionary stages of the flowering plant tree of life. However, the interactions between the ancestral genomes in a polyploid ...
Evolution
Mar 19, 2024
0
91
Writing a commentary in the 50th anniversary issue of Cell, Fu Qiaomei and E. Andrew Bennett, both of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, explored the ...
Evolution
Feb 29, 2024
0
187
Scientists have amassed genome data for dozens of "magic mushroom" isolates and cultivars, with the goal to learn more about how their domestication and cultivation has changed them. The findings, published December 4 in ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Dec 4, 2023
0
355
On a rush-hour train or a crowded flight, you might draw your limbs in close, shrinking as people fill the space. As it turns out, living cells behave similarly in confinement, adjusting their size while growing alongside ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 28, 2023
0
33
What defines the habitat—the ecological niche—of a microorganism? It is a combination of environmental factors such as temperature, moisture, and nutrient content. But the exact contribution of each of these factors is ...
Ecology
Apr 3, 2023
0
137
The largest genome of any insect, seven times the size of the human genome, was recently discovered in a grasshopper. In a study published in PLOS ONE, researchers from the German Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 16, 2023
0
1014
