Tag: "alignment" at biology news

How fish conquered the ocean

... terms with their impressive, comparative sequence alignment study of the involved yolk genes and proteins as published in PLoS ONE". In the paper the authors (RN Finn & BA Kristoffersen) have used Bayesian analysis to examine the evolution of vertebrate yolk protein (vitellogenin) genes in relation to...

Nobel Laureate finds 'elegant' explanation for DNA transcribing enzyme's high fidelity

...rs reported. “The specificity is a result of the alignment with the NTP that is critically dependent upon the base, sugar, phosphate and location when the trigger loop swings into position,?Kornberg said. “If it is misaligned even slightly, that set of contacts cannot occur.? As a consequence of that alignm...

Uniform tungsten trimers stand and deliver

...ged not only the trimers but also their consistent alignment with the single crystal structure of the platform. "A scanning tunneling microscope must be so stable that we have to vibrationally isolate the instrument. It cannot move even a small amount because we are using a stream of electrons to measure the d...

MIT engineers probe spiders' polymer art

...cteristics of a liquid crystal. It's the exquisite alignment of the protein fibers, Kojic said, that gives silk threads their amazing strength. While the silk stretches and dries, it forms miniscule crystalline structures that act as reinforcing agents. Engineered nanoparticles-tiny materials suspended in ...

Ring-like formations in drying DNA drops could affect hybridization studies

... the drying droplet in three dimensions. "The DNA alignment parallel to the droplet's edge was counterintuitive," Wong said. "We had expected the DNA to extend along the direction of flow, which was mainly in the radial direction. But, instead of resembling the spokes of a bicycle wheel, the transported DNA r...

Stimulation of the semicircular canals can artificially control human walking and balance

...ndicate that that controlled movement, rather than alignment to gravity, has been important for the development of modern human bipedalism. This new work has important implications for understanding how the brain processes sensory signals. According to the researchers, the findings indicate that from the s...

Light guides flight of migratory birds

...es with latitude and the time of year, so does the alignment of the band of polarized light. Muheim and Phillips argue that migratory songbirds average the sunrise and sunset intersections of the polarization band with the horizon to find the north-south meridian (geographic north-south axis), providing a r...

Researchers learn how blood vessel cells cope with their pressure-packed job

...rallel to the long axis of blood vessels, and this alignment is perpendicular to the direction of rhythmic stre... with, physical stretching to generate the healthy alignment of stress fibers." Indeed, when Chien's group used a genetic technique to increase the activity of R...

FDA: 'Highly Unlikely' Green Tea Lowers Cancer Risk

... incisions. Direct and natural hand-eye instrument alignment is similar to open surgery, with "all-around" vision and the ability to zoom in and out. Another advantage with da Vinci is the elimination of tremor. Surgeons can scale, or ratio, their finger movement to that of the robotic instrument. A movement ...

Screen all at risk for HIV, plus pregnant women

... incisions. Direct and natural hand-eye instrument alignment is similar to open surgery, with "all-around" vision and the ability to zoom in and out. Another advantage with da Vinci is the elimination of tremor. Surgeons can scale, or ratio, their finger movement to that of the robotic instrument. A movement ...

Surgical Robot 'Scrubs In' At UNC, May Be More Precise Than Conventional Surgery

... incisions. Direct and natural hand-eye instrument alignment is similar to open surgery, with "all-around" vision and the ability to zoom in and out. Another advantage with da Vinci is the elimination of tremor. Surgeons can scale, or ratio, their finger movement to that of the robotic instrument. A movement ...

Genomic sequences processed in minutes, rather than weeks

... threats. ScalaBLAST is a sophisticated "sequence alignment tool" that can divide the work of analyzing biological data into manageable fragments so large data sets can run on many processors simultaneously. The technology means large-scale problems -- such as the analysis of an organism -- can be solved in m...

Unexpressed But Indispensable -- The DNA Sequences That Control Development

...mental to vertebrate development. Through sequence alignment with increasingly strict criteria, they identified 1,373 highly conserved non-coding elements (CNEs), with an average length of about 200 base pairs. The average sequence match is 84%: not perfect, but much higher than for coding regions shared by hu...

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