Flowers may look delicate—but flowering plants, what scientists call angiosperms, are one of the most successful evolutionary organisms on the planet. Including more than 350,000 known species, they dominate the ecological ...
Evolution
Apr 10, 2024
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1
As a scientist, lab work can sometimes get monotonous. But in 2017, while a Ph.D. student of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the U.K., I heard a gleeful exclamation from across the room. Kirsty Penkman, head ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Apr 10, 2024
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965
To engineer proteins with useful functions, researchers usually begin with a natural protein that has a desirable function, such as emitting fluorescent light, and put it through many rounds of random mutation that eventually ...
Biotechnology
Apr 3, 2024
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7
Durable repression of a gene that has a role in controlling cholesterol levels, achieved without permanent genome editing, has been demonstrated in a mouse study published in Nature this week.
Biotechnology
Feb 29, 2024
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16
From Parkinson's and Alzheimer's to cardiac arrhythmia, amyloids are linked to a number of diseases. These aggregates of proteins form in the body when a protein loses its normal structure and misfolds or mutates. And since ...
Biochemistry
Feb 26, 2024
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28
The functioning of certain regions of a few genes in cetaceans (whales, porpoises and dolphins) may explain why the Blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) can reach lengths of up to 30 meters—almost 10 m more than a bus—while ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 22, 2024
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2
Brazilian snake and spider venoms continue to be a source of new discoveries with biotechnological potential. Two recently published studies show how this is possible even in relatively well-studied species such as the lancehead ...
Biotechnology
Jan 4, 2024
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285
A team of researchers has developed an innovative method to design complicated all-α proteins, characterized by their non-uniformly arranged α-helices as seen in hemoglobin. Employing their novel approach, the team successfully ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jan 4, 2024
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61
New findings published in Molecular Cell provide details about the hidden organization of the cytoplasm—the soup of liquid, organelles, proteins, and other molecules inside a cell. The research shows it makes a big difference ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 21, 2023
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131
Eelgrass, one of the most abundant plants in the ocean, originated in Japan before spreading around the globe. Now, scientists have shed light on both when and how eelgrass adapted and evolved throughout its history.
Plants & Animals
Dec 13, 2023
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