Crossed in Biological News

Signals from the Atlantic salmon highway

... in Maine's Penobscot River and released in Brewer, Maine in mid-May have crossed a line of underwater receivers off Halifax, Nova Scotia, the first fish to ... on nearby research vessels tending the array. The first tagged salmon crossed the Halifax line in early June. While only 30 of 150 ultrasonically ...

Sierra Nevada rose to current height earlier than thought, say Stanford geologists

... content of air over the Pacific Ocean as it blew onto the continent and crossed the Sierra Nevada. As the air gains elevation, it cools, moisture ... can estimate the elevation of the mountains at the time the ancient water crossed them. Volcanic glass is an excellent material for preserving ancient ...

Dangerous liaisons

... different strains of Arabidopsis from all over the world, which they crossed in 861 different combinations. Most of the hybrid plants were strong and ... barriers within a species continually increase, until two groups cannot be crossed at all anymore" says Weigel. While this view is widely accepted today, ...

How the plant immune system can drive the formation of new species

... different strains of Arabidopsis from all over the world, which they crossed in 861 different combinations. Most of the hybrid plants were strong and ... barriers within a species continually increase, until two groups cannot be crossed at all anymore says Weigel. While this view is widely accepted today, ...

Bad mitochondria may actually be good for you

... stress, these mice experienced less deterioration than normal. To confirm whether MCLK1-defiency could be somehow protective, the researchers crossed MCLK1-defective mice with those lacking SOD2, a major protein antioxidant. Normally, SOD2-defective mice accumulate cellular damage quickly, yet when ...

Early initiation of Arctic sea-ice formation

... one of the reasons postulated in causing the Earth to cool. However, the new findings imply that the threshold for sea-ice formation was first crossed in the Arctic, which, say the authors, is "a hypothesis opposite to that modelled for glacial ice, whereby Antarctica is shown to glaciate much ...

Who goes abroad for fertility treatment and why?

... number coming from Italy (31.8%), followed by Germany (14.4%), the Netherlands (12.1%) and France (8.7%). In total, people from 49 countries crossed borders for fertility treatment. The main reason for going abroad for fertility was to avoid legal restrictions at home. 80.6% of the German ...

Scorpion biodiversity

... canyon is arid savannah-like while the other boasts a lush, maquis-like forest environment separated by a narrow canyon floor that could easily be crossed by most animals and certainly would provide no barrier to a scorpion. The researchers collected nearly 200 specimens of six different species of ...

Bone deformities linked to inbreeding in Isle Royale wolves

... has been ongoing continuously for more than 50 years. The four packs there comprise 24 wolves, all descended from one female and one or two males who crossed an ice bridge from Canada during an unusually cold winter in the 1940s. Since then they have been isolated on the islands that make up Isle Royale ...

Researchers take first look at the genetic dynamics of inbreeding depression

... except for the composition of one of their chromosomes; only the genes of chromosome three differed between the lines. The researchers also crossed the three highest inbred lines to one another, creating outbred lines that could be compared with the inbred ones. Using oligonucleotide ...

Greatest thing since sliced bread: New data offer important clues toward improving wheat yields

... this analysis, the authors attempted to recreate the evolutionary events leading to the spontaneous origin of bread wheat in nature. To do this, they crossed a diploid and tetraploid progenitor species and formed a synthetic strain of wheat in the laboratory. Then they simultaneously measured genetic ...

Cancer-causing gene discovery suggests new therapies

... this process is for cancer formation." To test whether protein production induced by Myc played a role in cancer, the UCSF- led team genetically crossed two types of mice: one that was cancer-prone and overexpressed the Myc oncogene and one that was newly engineered to lower protein production. The ...

Sulfurous ping-pong in the urinary tract

... The group of Rudi Glockshuber recently published a paper about the protein, called ASST, in the scientific journal PNAS . ETH Zurich researchers crossed the disulfide bridge The discovery of the signal transfer mechanism happened accidentally, as is often the case in scientific research. The ...

Study a step toward disease-resistant crops, sustainability

... or diminish certain traits. "We are basically 'mining' natural variation for genes of interest," Weil said. The research started when Johal crossed a mutant gene that affects lesions to a couple of different inbred lines of corn. In one cross it disappeared; in another it became toxic. "We ...

Study rules out inbreeding as cause of amphibian deformities

... and DeWoody are actively looking for a cause or causes that may shed light upon high levels of malformation in frogs and other amphibians. "We've crossed out inbreeding as a possibility, an important step forward," DeWoody said. "But there's a lot of work yet to do." ...

Building a better bee

... DAVIS, CALIF. A UC Davis researcher known for her honey bee line "New World Carniolans" has crossed her bees with their Old World counterparts to enhance their positive characteristics. "The bees are very gentle, very hygienic and very ...

Earliest animal footprints ever found -- discovered in Nevada

... Nevada, with Hollingsworth in 2000 when he found the tracks. "This was truly an accidental discovery. We came on an outcrop that looked like it crossed the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary, so we stopped to take a look at it. We just sat down and started flipping rocks over. We were there less than an ...

Case Western Reserve University researchers track Chernobyl fallout

... while the radioactive cloud was over that country. Leeched of much of its radionuclides, much less plutonium fell on Poland when the cloud later crossed over its borders. Matisoff says that his team's findings are preliminary, having raised as many questions as they have answered. His goal is to ...

The truth about cats and dogs

... the cat and dog in 25% of the homes, while aggression and fighting were observed in 10% of the homes. One reason for the fighting might have been crossed inter-species signals. Cats and dogs may not have been able to read each other's body cues. For instance, cats tend to lash their tails about when ...

Key discovered to cold tolerance in corn

... climates and be productive for more months of the year in its current locations. The same approach might even be used with sugar cane, which may be crossed with Miscanthus, making improvement of cold-tolerance by breeding a possibility. ...

Genome communication

... pigmentation arises spontaneously from the wild-type allele, which causes dark purple pigmentation. If a plant with the paramutagenic allele is crossed with a wild-type allele, the progeny get both alleles. However, the paramutagenic allele silences the wild-type allele and produces a plant with ...

New research refutes myth of pure Scandinavian race

... or Skovgaard settlements could make use of, or he could have been the descendant of a female of arabian origin, who for reasons unknown, had crossed the river Elbe and settled down with the inhabitants of Zealand. "This discovery is comparable to the findings of a colleague of mine, who found ...

Undergraduates develop 'dirt-powered' microbial fuel cells to light Africa

... and author of Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation. As part of the course Edwards challenged students to develop an idea that crossed the conventional boundaries of art and science, imagining light engineering as an art form. In the course we found what many of us were missing in ...

Darwin was wrong about the wild origin of the chicken

... the grey jungle fowl, says Jonas Eriksson, a doctoral student at Uppsala University. It is most likely the case that the grey jungle fowl was crossed with an early form of the domesticated chicken. The genes for yellow skin are spread among billions of domesticated chickens around the world. ...

Plant geneticists find veritas in vino

... whose associations with resistances or tolerances of different grape varieties to specific diseases can now be investigated. Also Pinot Noir can be crossed with many wild grapespecies providing a large reservoir of disease-resistancegenes, which can be exploited with the aid of this genome road map. ...

Research sheds new light on how diseases jump across species

... of conservation concern. The research could have similar implications for developing new therapies for pathogenic diseases that have successfully crossed species to humans. Additionally, the team believes that the phenomenon may be involved in the emergence of many new, previously species-specific ...

A wheat for all seasons -- and reasons

... the country. Second, wheats will be crossbred to get regionally adapted lines, he said. The best annual lines of wheat for this region will be crossed with existing perennial wheat lines to adapt the perennial trait into regionally adapted wheat cultivars. The resulting crosses that display the ...

Challenges remain in reintroducing American chestnut

... chestnut hybrid as a cultivar or new species, which could hamper reintroduction to public lands. However, he stressed that just because the tree is crossed with the Asian chestnut to attain resistance, its physical traits and appearance should be indistinguishable from a pure American chestnut. "This ...

Auto immune response creates barrier to fertility; could be a step in speciation

... to study the timing of flowering.. I said, those look just like autoimmune mutants, Dangl recalled. Bomblies, Weigel and others at Max Planck crossed 280 genetically different strains of Arabidopsis from around the world into 881 different combinations: 2 percent of these crosses gave necrotic ...

One species' entire genome discovered inside another's

... around the world also may have to readjust their thinking. Before this study, geneticists knew of examples where genes from a parasite had crossed into the host, but such an event was considered a rare anomaly except in very simple organisms. Bacterial DNA is very conspicuous in its structure, ...

Trotting with emus to walk with dinosaurs

... Red Gulch. Researchers had found that sometimes a dinosaur's tracks became crossed ?that is, the left foot crossing over the right and the right crossing ... "Often they are looking around as they walk," said Breithaupt of the crossed foot tracks. "Sometimes they stop in mid-stride and look around." Walking ...

It's not all genetic: Common epigenetic problem doubles cancer risk in mice

... tossed a cancer-causing genetic mutation into the mix. The IGF2 mice were crossed with mice carrying a mutation in a gene called APC, which had been tied to ... who have loss of imprinting of IGF2. Only the Princeton mice have been crossed with the APC mice. Both the Princeton and the Swedish mice have the extra ...

Ancient genes used to produce salt-tolerant wheat

... originally came from a wheat ancestor, Triticum monococcum," says research team leader, CSIRO Plant Industry's Dr Rana Munns. "They were unwittingly crossed into a durum wheat line about 35 years ago and are normally not present in any modern wheat." The project began when the CSIRO team used a ...

Tracking sperm whales and jumbo squid

... miles a day within a relatively small area, suggesting that they had found an abundant supply of food. The tagged predators and prey must have crossed paths at some time during the experiment, Gilly noted. "Based on the locations of where the squid tags first appeared on the surface, all three squid ...

Tumor-suppressor gene is critical for placenta development

... DNA that lies between two gene markers. She then used a second transgenic mouse in which the gene markers were placed in the Rb gene. When she crossed the two strains of mice, the resulting embryos had the DNA-destroying enzyme and the gene markers in their placenta stem cells. The enzyme removed ...

Nanotechnology shows promise as next wrinkle fighter

... more important in new technology such as electronic monitors. The cosmetic arsenal to fight human wrinkles embraces technologies that seems crossed with science fiction ?from microdermabrasians to lasers to Botox injections ? and nanoparticles are poised to join the war by warding off dreaded ...

New culture method for hepatitis C virus uses primary hepatocytes and patient serum

... of novel virus isolates from patients using nontransformed hepatocytes. Nelson Fausto of the University of Washington School of Medicine has crossed this hurdle using a human fetal hepatocyte culture system that was previously developed in his lab. Using this system, his group has demonstrated ...

Road-crossing in chimpanzees: A risky business

... individuals travel within a group--was studied in the small community of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at Bossou, Guinea, West Africa as they crossed two roads, one large and busy with traffic, the other smaller and frequented mostly by pedestrians. Adult males, less fearful and more physically ...

Geneticists discover genes that make fruit fly hybrids sterile

... in a D. simulans gene called "Lhr" (Lethal hybrid rescue) that make these genes nonfunctional. When either of these genes is "turned off" and then crossed with the other fruit fly species, the males survive. "We have found the first example of two genes that interact to cause lethality in a species ...