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Tag: "millions" at biology news

Mobile DNA part of evolution's toolbox

...th -- an ancient fish thought to have gone extinct millions of years ago until a live specimen was caught in 1...efore separated from the coelacanth by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, yet the two organisms still share critical DNA sequences. In the coelacanth...

Fire ants: Their true story told by the scientist who loves them

..., natives don't. Consequently, the USDA has wasted millions on what Tschinkel calls politically motivated campaigns to eradicate S. invicta with little or no improvement in native survival to show for it. "Fire ants have been the victims of a good deal of bad science," he said. Ironically, 75 percent of the...

Where have all the butterflies gone?

...Davis. That's a turnaround from last spring, when millions of painted lady butterflies migrated through the Central Valley. But other species have seen steep declines in recent years and could disappear from the region altogether. "It has been the worst spring for butterflies of my 35 in California," Shapir...

Bacteria have their own immune system protecting against outside DNA

...ation of how pathogenic bacteria have evolved over millions of years." The researchers also learned that the H-NS protein is able to recognize foreign DNA on the basis of its increased content of adenine and thymine, the building blocks of DNA. "It has been a great mystery why disease-causing genes of bacte...

Taking the wrinkles out of motoneuronal disease

...m underlying neuronal communication. The legacy of millions of years of evolution and competition between venomous species has resulted in deadly neurotoxins capable of blocking neuronal communication. I am using our knowledge of the mode of action of these neurotoxins to design a selective motoneuron deliver...

Einstein researchers take the pulse of a gene in living cells

...e expression in tumors and other tissues. But with millions of cells involved, microarrays reflect only "average" gene expression. Just how a gene is transcribed in a single cell--continuously, intermittently or some other way--has largely been a mystery. Now, in observing a gene that plays a major role in ...

Massive duplication of genes may solve Darwin's 'abominable mystery' about flowering plants

...e events are notoriously difficult to detect after millions of years. So dePamphilis and colleagues relied on a statistical filter to hunt for ancient duplications. In order to show that such an event occurred early in angiosperm history, dePamphilis and his colleagues had to compare the genomes of "basal" ...

Corals switch skeleton material as seawater changes

...ter generation of tiny coral polyps over sometimes millions of years of coral growth in the same location. The...nesium-calcium ratio of seawater changes only over millions of years and has no direct relationship to recent global warming and ocean acidification, which are ...

Major initiative proposed to address amphibian crisis

...me levels. However, they persisted for hundreds of millions of years and just now are disappearing in many areas." Some of the causes have been identified. Rising levels of ultraviolet radiation, increases in pollutants, pesticides, extensive habitat loss due to agriculture or urbanization, invasive specie...

How bad is malaria anemia? It may depend on your genes

...and in parts of the world where mosquitoes thrive, millions are infected, most of them by early childhood. Once in the bloodstream, plasmodium invades liver and red blood cells and makes more copies of itself. Eventually, as red cells break and free plasmodium to infect other cells, and as the body's immune s...

Immune system police learn early and sometimes badly

...ercent of the total T cell population, can control millions of roaming T cells. They found it was a simple matter of numbers: by wearing many hats, or antigen receptors, regulatory T cells can keep their eyes on a lot of different non-regulatory cells. "The next question we will ask, which is a hot topic r...

Harmful Algal Blooms monitored from space in Chile

...eased in frequency over the last 30 years, causing millions of Euros worth of annual losses to the 360 fish farms found in the southern region of Chile. They deplete the concentration of oxygen in sea water, potentially killing larger caged fish such as salmon that cannot flee the affected area. In the ca...

Ten years later, Dolly is still making headlines

...to put once inaccessible drugs within the reach of millions more people, but at what cost? At the Boston meeting, there will be an Open Forum on Sunday, June 18 from 8 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. in the Hynes Convention Center to discuss the various regulatory, scientific and ethical issues surrounding generic biopharm...

New flood-tolerant rice offers relief for world's poorest farmers

...iculture's oldest challenges and offering reliefto millions of poor rice farmers around the world. While rice thrives in standing water, like all crops it will die ifcompletely submerged for more than a few days. The development andcultivation of the new varieties is expected to increase foodsecurity for 70...

Natural pine bark extract relieves muscle cramp and pain in athletes and diabetics

...letes and healthy, normal individuals. "With the millions of athletes worldwide, this truly is a profound breakthrough and extremely significant for all individuals interested in muscle cramp and pain relief with a natural approach. These findings indicate that Pycnogenol can play an important role in sport...

Ready, set, mutate?and may the best microbe win

... fermentor for new strains every other day. Though millions of mutations in the target gene are believed to have occurred, only about 700 of those were capable of creating a new variant of the target gene. In all, the researchers identified 343 unique strains, each of which contained one of just six variants ...

Study supports 'urgent' need for worldwide ban on lead-based paint

...uture. "Lead-based paints have already poisoned millions of children in the United States and will likely cause similar damage in the future as paint use increases in Asian countries and elsewhere," he says. "Our findings provide stark evidence of the urgent need for an effective worldwide ban on the use o...

Molecular DNA switch found to be the same for all life

...t DNA replication is an ancient event that evolved millions of years ago, prior to when Archaea, Bacteria and ...mportance of the replication process. Through the millions of years, evolution has added bells and whistles around this highly conserved central engine." ...

When the going gets tough, slime molds start synthesizing

...e cellular machinery used to make them evolve over millions of years to provide new ways for the host organisms to survive and prosper. Understanding the diversity of natural chemicals and the machinery that produces them gives us a window to look back in time and understand how organisms evolve at the molecu...

Researchers identify human DNA on the fast track

...e DNA regions have hardly changed at all over many millions of years in most species," said Pollard. "My twist was to look for the subset of these regions that have changed just in humans." Forty-nine regions, which the team called human accelerated regions (HARs), rose to the top of the list. Surprisingly,...

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