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Tag: "ancient" at biology news

Movie spies on malaria parasite's sneaky behavior

...sites and camouflages them," said Ménard. Like the ancient Greek warriors who hid inside a giant hollow horse to gain entry to Troy, the malaria parasites wrap themselves in a structure made of liver cell membrane. This membrane cloak enables them to sneak past immune cell sentinels and return to the bloodst...

Snakes' virtual glasses, leopard spots and all-optical transistors

... Leopard's spots and Zebra's stripes inspired the ancient myths famously retold in Kipling's "Just So Stories." They also led legendary mathematician Alan Turing to suggest that some patterns in nature are due to various chemicals, or morphogens, diffusing across surfaces and forming shapes where they inter...

Study shows frogs can play key role in stem cell research

...d humbling, to find that the proteins from such an ancient animal such as the frog can rescue the behaviour o...mit and giving rise to many types of cell are thus ancient features of early embryonic cells, crucial for the correct development of both frogs and humans." ...

Scientists reverse evolution

...ain," Tvrdik says. "We are first to reconstruct an ancient gene. ?We have proven that from two specialized modern genes, we can reconstruct the ancient gene they split off from. It illuminates the mechanisms and processes that evolution uses, and tells...

Arctic coring expedition continues to yield new clues

...afloor sediment samples. "Building a picture of ancient climatic events is a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and what ACEX allowed us to do was fill in a blank section of the PETM picture," said Gerald Dickens, a Rice University geochemist and co-author, who conducted the initial, shipboard che...

Basic work on E. coli identifies two new keys to regulation of bacterial gene expression

...of how sometimes less is more, and a probably very ancient example of one of the methods that arose through evolution to regulate gene expression." Ribosomal RNA makes up the bulk of ribosomes, the molecular machines that make proteins and are present in huge numbers in all cells. Since so much of the cell'...

Molecular DNA switch found to be the same for all life

...e new findings indicate that DNA replication is an ancient event that evolved millions of years ago, prior to when Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya split into separate domains of life. "The ability of a cell to replicate its DNA in a timely and faithful manner is fundamental for survival, but, despite decad...

How ancient whales lost their legs, got sleek and conquered the oceans

When ancient whales finally parted company with the last remnan... from contemporary spotted dolphins and fossils of ancient whales to try to pinpoint the genetic changes that could have caused whales, dolphins and porpoises ...

UCLA scientists strengthen case for life more than 3.8 billion years ago

...d an area on Akilia Island in West Greenland where ancient rocks were discovered that may preserve carbon-iso...ying he is confident the rocks contain evidence of ancient life, but "it's not a slam dunk." Why is there doubt? After more than 3.8 billion years, the rock...

Ancient global warming drove early primates' dispersal

... Sciences. Their work focuses on Teilhardina, an ancient genus that resembled the saucer-eyed, modern-day p...h Asia to Europe, crossing the Turgai Straits---an ancient seaway between Europe and Asia---and then spread to North America by way of Greenland. The whole d...

Attacking cancer's sweet tooth is effective strategy against tumors

An ancient avenue for producing cellular energy, the glycolytic pathway, could provide a surprisingly rich target for anti-cancer therapies. A team of Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers knocked down one of the pathway's enzymes, LDHA, in a variety of fa...

Major obesity gene is 'lost in the shuffle'

... "In essence, we are observing the result of an ancient gene 'knockout' experiment," Ishida explains. "The deletion ?or 'knockout' ?of the ASIP gene may have helped gibbons adapt to arboreal niches. We know that the ASIP protein regulates lipid metabolism in humans, so there is certainly reason to pre...

Evolution of 'irreducible complexity' explained

Using new techniques for resurrecting ancient genes, scientists have for the first time reconstr...d Thornton. "New techniques allowed us to see how ancient genes and their functions evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. We found that complexity evolv...

Inside rocks, implications for finding life on Mars

... Schopf and colleagues have produced 3-D images of ancient fossils -- 650 million to 850 million years old --...hich he reports confocal microscopy results of the ancient fossils. (He published ancient Raman spectroscopy 3-D images of ancient fossils in 2005 in the journ...

Amber reveals ecology of 30 million year old spiders

...ried out the first comparative scientific study of ancient spiders trapped in amber more than 30 millions yea...back to the Cenozoic period. It is the first time ancient spiders from different parts of the world have been compared on such a large scale. 671 species of s...

Study finds 60 new genes controlled by DNA snippet

Researchers worldwide are seeking to define ancient sections of our genetic code that may soon be as important to medical science as genes. A new wave of research is concerned with, not how genes work, but how small regulatory DNA sequences tell genes where, when and to what degree to "turn on." As pa...

Evolution mystery: Spider venom and bacteria share same toxin

...e University of Arizona have found evidence for an ancient transfer of a toxin between ancestors of two very ...puzzle with evidence from living descendants of an ancient ancestor," said Greta Binford, assistant professor of biology at Lewis & Clark. Her coresearcher...

Ancient fossil DNA found preserved in crystal

...recently discovered a new source of well-preserved ancient DNA in fossil bones. Their findings were published...ssess such crystal structures containing preserved ancient DNA. After treating two modern and six fossil animal bones with the sodium hypo-chlorite, they fou...

One fish, two fish: New MIT sensor improves fish counts

... - they wanted to see if their device could locate ancient riverbeds under the ocean floor. But when their reconnaissance images did not match the riverbeds, the researchers went back with a new approach, and determined that they were seeing fish - tens of millions of fish. This marks the first time scienti...

Most human-chimp differences due to gene regulation ?not genes

...t altering the regulation of these fundamental and ancient genes may be harmful. In fact, five of the 100 most stable genes have altered expression levels in liver cancer. When they also looked for human genes with significantly higher or lower expression levels, they found 14 genes with increased expressio...

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