Tag: "hidden" at biology news

Genome of deadly amoeba shows surprising complexity, evidence of lateral gene transfer

...stem. This could explain why the parasite can stay hidden in the body for years at a time. Such information may help researchers find better means to harness the immune system to eradicate infection through vaccine development. A number of the metabolic adaptations and stratagems identified from the E. his...

Plants defy Mendel's inheritance laws, may prompt textbook changes

...rents. These mutant parent plants apparently have hidden templates containing genetic information from the preceding generation that can be transferred to their offspring, even though the traits aren't evident in the parents, according to Purdue University researchers. This discovery flies in the face of t...

50-year-old Mystery Solved: Protein Tags Regulate Key Ion Channel

...raged a lot of people." The problem was that some hidden mechanism was silencing the channel, plugging the pipeline, but no known method of channel regulation seemed to be involved. Goldstein and colleagues began to suspect sumoylation [SUE-mow-e-LAY-shun]. In this process, an enzyme attaches a small pept...

Secret of smallpox's success may lead to bioterror cure

...from mammalian immune systems. The ability to stay hidden allows the smallpox virus, in particular, time to grow and multiply to the point of causing devastating disease before the immune system detects it and attempts to mount a counter-attack. Jacobs notes that there have been clues to this property of t...

Rhesus monkeys can assess the visual perspective of others when competing for food

...e, rhesus monkeys were unable to find food under a hidden location when the human experimenter who hid the food preferentially looked at the hidden location. These results suggest that competition-like situations may bring out the primates' abiliti...

Designing vaccines by computer

...ing can help scientists to uncover and harness the hidden patterns in the wealth of DNA and protein sequences that modern bioscience generates and cut the number of compounds drug companies need to test when searching for new vaccines. Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Researc...

A New Species of Monkey is Discovered in Tanzania: The First in Africa for More Than 20 Years

...e wildlife research over the last century has been hidden right under our noses." The new arboreal mangabey is brown, with a head and body length of about 3 ft (90 cm). It is characterized by a long, erect crest of hair on its head, elongated cheek whiskers, an off-white belly and tail, and an unusual cal...

Rabies spread speeds up

...dors by distributing vaccine baits - vaccine doses hidden in fishmeal - to wild raccoons. This cordon sanitaire strategy limited rabies in Ohio to sporadic cases from 1997 until 2004, when a single rabid animal was detected - 11 kilometers beyond the buffer zone - in northeastern Ohio. By modelling the spre...

Mice brains shrink during winter, impairing some learning and memory

...ch the mice had to swim to find an escape platform hidden just below the surface of opaque water. They were ...took longer and swam farther before they found the hidden platform than did the long-day mice, indicating they had more trouble learning where the platform wa...

UCLA cancer researchers shake loose hidden biomarker

...es to access the biomarker, transforming it from a hidden target into an exposed one. "In prostate cancer c...in a well-differentiated morphology, with the PSMA hidden in the apical membrane of the cell, even when the cancer spreads outside the prostate ?a fact that h...

Multi-species genome comparison sheds new light on evolutionary processes, cancer mutations

...ecific chromosomes. "This study has revealed many hidden secrets on the nature and timing of genome evolution in mammals, and it demonstrates how the study of basic evolutionary processes can lead to new insights into the origin of human diseases," said Dr. Lewin, who is director of the Institute of Genomi...

Measuring hidden parasites in falciparum malaria

A new technique for measuring hidden malaria parasites and assessing severity of disease is described in a paper published on Aug 23rd in PLoS Medicine . Researchers led by Professor Nick White from Mahidol University, Thailand, looked at patients with the most dangerous type of malari...

Fundamental discovery -- Bone fracture

...shells. This glue involves sacrificial bonds (with hidden length) that uncoil when the bone is stressed." That interdisciplinary research group included the research groups of Morse and Stucky, as well as that of Herbert J. Waite. Said co-author Daniel Morse, director of UCSB's Institute for Collaborative ...

'Underground' tunnels discovered as means for communication between immune system cells

...ve network of tiny tunnels that, like a building's hidden pneumatic tube system, are used to shoot signals t...studies, they described how dendritic cells unfurl hidden veils - membranes that are so thin they can barely be imaged - and use these veils to move in on and...

Computer modeling reveals hidden conversations within cells

...ehavior of a cell. The computer model reveals the hidden conversations in the cell's wiring." The researchers attribute their success in developing the computer model, despite criticism that the computational approach would require too many simplifications to accurately model cell communication, to the di...

Hidden sponges determine coral reef's nutrient cycle

Marine organisms hidden in caves, such as sponges, play an extremely impor... water into the sea. According to Scheffers, these hidden organisms play a key role in the marine nutrient cycle due to their incredible capacity to convert e...

Scientists get first glimpse at how plants, most animals repair UV-damaged DNA

...zyme wouldn't be able to reach the dimer, which is hidden inside the coiled DNA molecule, Zhong said. But electrical interactions between the DNA molecule and the enzyme cause the portion of the DNA that contains the dimer to flip outwards from the coil and into the pocket. Then, when a photon of visible l...

Scientists crack 40-year-old DNA puzzle and point to 'hot soup' at the origin of life

... "There are still relics of a very old simple code hidden away in our DNA and in the structures of our cells," said Dr van den Elsen, who points to several aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases - molecules involved in protein synthesis - which only look at pairs of bases in triplet codons, as well as other physical ev...

Nanoparticles, nanoshells, nanotubes: How tiny specks may provide powerful tools against cancer

...ly excretes them as waste. The nanoshells are also hidden from the immune system because they are "shielded" by a protective polymer coating, poly-(ethylene glycol) or PEG. This does not change the properties of the nanoshells but renders them "invisible" to the body's natural defense mechanism. Twenty ho...

Science's Breakthrough of the Year: Watching evolution in action

...s of early Earth are just sunk deep in the planet, hidden from view. Key Protein's Close-up: The most detailed molecular portrait to date of a voltage-gated potassium channel was unveiled in 2005. These channels, gatekeeper proteins that usher potassium ions in and out of cells, are as key to nerve and mus...

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