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Researchers Karnelia Paul of the University of Calcutta (India), Chinmay Saha of the University of Kalyani (India), and Anindita Seal of the University of Calcutta (India) designed research to study nitrogen nutrition in rice. Nitrogen supply limits crop…

A bacterial infection is not just an unpleasant experience—it can also be a major health problem. Some bacteria develop resistance to otherwise effective treatment with antibiotics. Therefore, researchers are trying to develop new types of antibiotics that…

Expansions of DNA repeats are very hard to analyze. A method developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin allows for a detailed look at these previously inaccessible regions of the genome. It combines nanopore…

They play a leading role not only in muscle cells: Actin filaments are one of the most abundant proteins in all mammalian cells. The filigree structures form an important part of the cytoskeleton and locomotor system. Cell biologists at the University of…

In a new report on Science Advances, Hui Kwon Kim and interdisciplinary researchers at the departments of Pharmacology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Medical Sciences, Nanomedicine and Bioinformatics in the Republic of Korea, evaluated the activities of…

Living beings, especially microorganisms, have a surprising ability to adapt to the most extreme environments on Earth, but there are still places where they cannot live. European researchers have confirmed the absence of microbial life in hot, saline,…

Cilia, or flagella—whiplike appendages on cells—perform diverse tasks required to keep the body healthy. When cilia malfunction, the consequences can be devastating, causing a range of problems, from blindness, to lung and kidney diseases, to congenital…

Early in mammalian embryonic development, long before the organism's ultimate form has taken shape, a precious subset of its cells are set aside for future use in creating offspring. This task bestows on that subset of cells a special kind of immortality.…

For most frogs, motherhood begins and ends with the release of hundreds of eggs into a sizable body of water and then hopping or swimming away.

New insights into the process of DNA looping have changed old perspectives about how the genome is organized within cells. Discoveries by IMP researchers have now elucidated a fundamental mechanism of life and settle a decade-long scientific dispute.

Biotech giant Monsanto on Thursday agreed to plead guilty to illegally using a banned and highly toxic pesticide on research crops at one of its facilities on the Hawaiian island of Maui and to pay $10 million in fines.

The emergence of a new coral disease in Micronesian reefs, termed grey-patch disease, is reported in the open access journal Microbiome. The disease alters the community of microbes found on the host coral and measuring these changes may be a useful tool for…

A study out of the University of Arkansas investigated whether bulbs can flower and persist in warm-season lawns while providing nutrition for pollinating insects.

Most mammals walk at slow speeds and run or trot at intermediate speeds because these movement strategies are energetically optimal, according to a study published in PLOS Computational Biology by Delyle Polet and John Bertram of the University of Calgary in…

Farmers rely on seed systems for access to high-quality, disease-free planting material at the start of the season. Good seed systems ensure access to seed for a variety of crops that are affordable and fully available at the start of the season.…

Getting to the doctor's office for a check-up can be challenging for someone with a neurological disorder that impairs their movement, such as a stroke. But what if the patient could just take a video clip of their movements with a smart phone and forward the…

The secret recipe nature uses to make the diverse leaf shapes we see everywhere around us has been revealed in research.

When pathogens invade cells, our body combats them using various methods. Researchers at the University of Basel's Biozentrum have now been able to show how a cellular pump keeps such invading pathogens in check. As the researchers report in Science, this pump…

When studying how organisms evolve, biologists consider most traits, or features, as derived from some earlier version already present in their ancestors. Few traits are regarded as truly "novel."

Researchers are pursuing engineered bacteriophage as alternatives to antibiotics to infect and kill multi-drug resistant bacteria. The potential for an innovative synthetic biology approach to enhance phage therapeutics and the role a biofoundry can play in…

Ronda seemed doomed. The six-year-old French mastiff had developed a tumour on her paw that required amputation and the fitting of a prosthetic leg—a rare and complex operation.

Changes in the genes that control development can potentially make large contributions to evolution by generating new morphologies in plants and animals. However, because developmental genes frequently influence many different processes, changes to their…

The DNA of a single cell is two to three meters long end-to-end. To fit in the nucleus and function correctly, DNA is packaged around specialized proteins. These DNA-protein complexes are called nucleosomes, and they are a small part of a larger structure…

The threespine stickleback, a small fish found throughout the coastal areas of the Northern Hemisphere, is famously variable in appearance from one location to another, making it an ideal subject for studying how species adapt to different environments. A new…

From mid-November 2015 through February 2016, scientists used GPS transmitters to track the movements of Canada geese near Midway International Airport in Chicago. They discovered that—in the colder months, at least—some geese are hanging out on rooftops,…

The world's love for chocolate has helped decimate protected forests in western Africa as some residents have turned protected areas into illegal cocoa farms and hunting grounds.

New research, led by the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) at the University of St Andrews, develops method to better record breeding histories of seals, allowing for improved fecundity calculations.

If you thought zebra duiker and otter shrew were four different animals, think again. These are just two of the elusive creatures that Fauna & Flora International (FFI) and partners were hoping to track down during recent surveys of large and small mammals in…

Scientists from Imperial and the University of Bergen have found a new way to predict how a disease will likely progress in individual patients.

A quartet of researchers with PSL Research University, CNRS, has found that a peptide in male fruit fly semen somehow makes its way to the female fruit fly brain after copulation, resulting in improvements in long-term memory. In their paper published in the…