Oversized fat droplets: Too much of a good thing

As the national waistline expands, so do pools of intra-cellular fat known as lipid droplets. Although most of us wish our lipid droplets would vanish, they represent a cellular paradox: on the one hand droplets play beneficial ...

Plants may have a single ancestor

(PhysOrg.com) -- An international group of scientists has analyzed the DNA of primitive microscopic algae, and their findings suggest that all plants on Earth may have had a single ancestor.

Last universal common ancestor more complex than previously thought

Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical ...

Self-digestion as a means of survival

In times of starvation, cells tighten their belts: they start to digest their own proteins and cellular organs. The process - known as autophagy - takes place in special organelles called autophagosomes. It is a strategy ...

'Birth control' for centrioles

Like DNA, centrioles need to duplicate only once per cell cycle. Rogers et al. uncover a long-sought mechanism that limits centriole copying, showing that it depends on the timely demolition of a protein that spurs the organelles' ...

page 10 from 10