Scientists discover new antiviral defense system in bacteria

Bacteria use a variety of defense strategies to fight off viral infection, and some of these systems have led to groundbreaking technologies, such as CRISPR-based gene-editing. Scientists predict there are many more antiviral ...

Why crop rotation works

Crop rotation has been used since Roman times to improve plant nutrition and to control the spread of disease. A new study to be published in Nature's 'The ISME Journal' reveals the profound effect it has on enriching soil ...

Tiny algae shed light on photosynthesis as a dynamic property

Many of the world's most important photosynthetic eukaryotes such as plants got their light-harnessing organelles (chloroplasts) indirectly from other organisms through endosymbiosis. In some instances, this resulted in algae ...

Research team discovers 'impossible' unicellular organism

The origin of eukaryotes is considered one of the greatest enigmas in biology: according to current doctrine, two prokaryotes, a so-called Asgard archaeon and a bacterium, are believed to have merged. The bacterium is said ...

Findings illuminate animal evolution in protein function

Virginia Commonwealth University and University of Richmond researchers recently teamed up to explore the inner workings of cells and shed light on the 400–600 million years of evolution between humans and early animals ...

Novel carbon source sustains deep-sea microorganism communities

The first in-depth analyses of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) cycling in the Red Sea highlights the important role of migrating shoals of fish in sustaining deep-ocean microorganisms and potentially the global carbon cycle.

Misfolded proteins serve as 'inherited memory' of toxic insults

Protein aggregates have a bad reputation in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, but in bacteria, inheritance of aggregates by daughter cells may help protect against the same toxic stresses that ...

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