Unicellular in Biological News

Genome of marine organism tells of humans' unicellular ancestors

... "Choanoflagellates are the closest living unicellular relatives of animals and, as such, can help us ... light on the biology and genome content of the unicellular organisms from which we evolved." One finding ... are our best way of triangulating on that last unicellular ancestor of animals, because the fossil record is ...

Life on Earth came from other planets

... earth must have originated on other planets. But then, how did it get here? Most scientists believe all Earthly life descended from the first unicellular creatures that appeared on this planet. Based on an extensive and detailed analysis and synthesis of over 100 research reports published in ...

Surviving mass extinction by leading a double life

... Drifting across the world's oceans are a group of unicellular marine microorganisms that are not only a crucial source of food for other marine life but their fossils, which are found in abundance, provide ...

Lohafex provides new insights on plankton ecology

... ocean iron fertilization experiments. The larger blooms stimulated by earlier experiments were due to a group of algae known as diatoms. These unicellular algae are protected against grazers by shells made of glass (silica) and are known to sink to great depths after blooming. Diatoms could not grow in ...

How Volvox got its groove

... evolved from single cells. Cooperating successfully is the key, Herron said. "All the macroscopic organisms we see around us trace back to unicellular ancestors," said Herron, a doctoral candidate in the UA's department of ecology and evolutionary biology. "Each of those groups had to go through a ...

LOHAFEX: An Indo-German iron fertilization experiment

... after which a patch of 300 square kilometres will be fertilized with six tons of dissolved iron. This will lead to rapid growth of the minute, unicellular algae known as phytoplankton. These algae do not only provide the food sustaining oceanic life, but also play a key role in regulating concentrations ...

Voracious sponges save reef

... filtration cells and discard their old cells. This short cell cycle is unique for multicellular organisms and to date was only known to occur in unicellular organisms. The production and breakdown process of the sponge cells mirrors that in the human intestinal tract. Eating and being eaten Coal ...

Engineering algae to make fuel instead of sugar

... WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - In pursuing cleaner energy there is such a thing as being too green. unicellular microalgae, for instance, can be considered too green. In a paper in a special energy issue of Optics Express , the Optical Society's (OSA) ...

Proteins strangle cell during division

... hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. The organism is a member of the third main group of life on earth, the Archaea. Archaea, like bacteria, are unicellular organisms but in terms of evolution they are more closely related to another main group of living things, the eukaryotes (humans, animals, plants, ...

Researchers discover architecture for fundamental processes of life

... genomics pioneer Prof. Howard Bussey and Prof. Jackie Vogel. Our team systematically analyzed the interactions of proteins of bakers yeast, a unicellular organism confirmed to provide insight into fundamental processes shared by most living cells including those of humans, explained Prof. Michnick. ...

Algae could one day be major hydrogen fuel source

... produced from corn, but generating ethanol from corn is a thermodynamically much more inefficient process. Some varieties of algae, a kind of unicellular plant, contain an enzyme called hydrogenase that can create small amounts of hydrogen gas. Tiede said many believe this is used by Nature as a way to ...

In diatom, scientists find genes that may level engineering hurdle

... MADISON Denizens of oceans, lakes and even wet soil, diatoms are unicellular algae that encase themselves in intricately patterned, glass-like shells. Curiously, these tiny phytoplankton could be harboring the next big ...

El Niño affected by global warming

... core sediment sampled from 80 m depth under the Bay of Mejillones, in northern Chile, were determined. Analysis of breakdown byproducts from diatoms, unicellular planktonic algae, yielded an accurate trace of this regions trends in sea surface temperature between 1650 and 2000. Data for the period 1820-1878 ...

Moss genome shows how plants invaded the land and learned to survive heat and drought

... nor produce seeds, but reproduce via spores. Mishler said that Physcomitrella is well-placed phylogenetically to fill in the large gap between the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas, also sequenced by the Joint Genome Institute, and the flowering plants. "Having the full Physcomitrella genome available ...

DOE JGI Community Sequencing Program delivers first moss genome

... to seed desiccation in flowering plants. Mishler said that Physcomitrella is well placed phylogenetically to fill in the large gap between the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas, also sequenced by DOE JGI, and the flowering plants. Having the full Physcomitrella genome available to the public ...

'Chlamy' genome holds clues for renewable energy, the environment and human health

... that control photosynthesis and the function of flagella. The genome also provides a glimpse back through time to when all plants and animals were unicellular and used flagella to swim. When they became multicellular, plants put down roots and lost their flagella while animals retained flagella on certain ...

Upgraded IMG 2.3 Data Management System released by DOE JGI to eager user community

... release of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Reference Sequence (RefSeq) collection, now includes fungi, protists (eukaryotic unicellular organisms), and plant genomes to enhance the breadth of comparative analysis. A new addition of particular interest to DOE is Pichia stipitis CBS ...

Hidden interactions between predators and prey: evolution causes cryptic dynamics in ecology

... to show that cryptic evolutionary dynamics can link these populations. The authors observed the dynamics of a rotifer and its food source, a unicellular alga, in a laboratory microcosm (in this case, a chemostat with an aqueous growth chamber whose nutrient supply is kept steady through a continuous ...

Unicellular microRNA discovery

... report on their discovery of microRNAs in the unicellular green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This is the first finding of microRNAs in a unicellular organism. “The finding changes the dogma that ... colleagues now extend the range of miRNAs into unicellular organisms, with their discovery of a large number ...

A new male-specific gene in algae unveils an origin of male and female

... male sexuality of an oogamous multicellular green algae species, Pleodorina starrii, and one of the mating types of its isogamous ancestor, the unicellular alga Clamydomonas reinhardtii. In C. reinhardtii, isogamous sexual reproduction occurs through "plus" (MT+) and "minus" (MT-) mating types. MT- ...

Taking evolution's temperature: Researchers pinpoint the energy it takes to make a species

... in terms of energy," Allen said. "This will help efforts to identify and model areas for protection and conservation." By observing changes in a unicellular animal whose body temperature varies according to its surroundings, as opposed to a mammal, which regulates a constant body temperature, scientists ...

Similar Stem Cells In Insect And Human Gut

... France presented her findings Sunday at the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco. The spring in the unicellular Vorticella is a contractile fiber bundle, called the spasmoneme, which runs the length of the stalk. At rest, the stalk is elongated like a stretched ...

Are U.S. Flu Death Figures More PR Than Science?

... France presented her findings Sunday at the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco. The spring in the unicellular Vorticella is a contractile fiber bundle, called the spasmoneme, which runs the length of the stalk. At rest, the stalk is elongated like a stretched ...

Nano springs eternal; Protozoan 'engine' posts nano records

... France presented her findings Sunday at the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco. The spring in the unicellular Vorticella is a contractile fiber bundle, called the spasmoneme, which runs the length of the stalk. At rest, the stalk is elongated like a stretched ...

Student scientists create living bacterial photographs

... light. E. coli are found naturally in the dark confines of the human gut and wouldn't normally sense light, so the students had to engineer the unicellular machines to work as a photo-capturing surface. UCSF biophysics graduate student Anselm Levskaya and his adviser, Dr. Chris Voigt, first ...

Family trees of ancient bacteria reveal evolutionary moves

... Additional species were added to the tree using ribosomal RNA genes. Morphological characters, for instance, the presence or absence of a sheath, unicellular or filamentous growth, the presence or absence of heterocysts ?a thick-walled cell occurring at intervals?were coded and mapped on the tree. The ...