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Tag: "simpler" at biology news

Wisconsin scientists grow critical nerve cells

...urons, says Zhang. The goal proved elusive even in simpler vertebrates such as mice, whose embryonic stem cells have been available to scientists for decades. One reason scientists have had difficulty making motor neurons, Zhang believes, may be that they are one of the earliest neural structures to emerge ...

Chemists synthesize molecule that helps body battle cancers, malaria

...t to strip away nonessential structures, leaving a simpler and more potent core. "One frequent problem encountered with vaccines is ensuring that the vaccine is potent enough to elicit a strong immune response," Gin said. "We will continue looking for ways to produce new molecules similar to QS-21A that wil...

Bees, Brains and Addiction

...tter understanding of human addiction by examining simpler brains, such as those of bees. Bees learn to land on a tile of a certain color after they are rewarded just once with sugar water for landing on that color. A single nerve cell in a bee's brain, Sejnowski explains, is responsible for deciding if the...

Simple explanation for complex pattern of feather development

...hat more complex shafted feathers evolved from the simpler downy tufts by the addition of new players to the original activator-inhibitor pair. Prum is now following up on several clues in the search for these other molecular signals. ...

New technique could alter field of mouse genetics

...o insert genes and mutate genes in fruit flies and simpler organisms to learn the function of individual genes. "We know how many genes are in the genome, but that does not tell us how they carry out their jobs," said senior author Tian Xu, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Yale Unive...

New book expands biological classifications to account for 'alien' life

...some life forms that have been modified to be much simpler than what is normally found on Earth. "We may never find other life away from Earth, but we have already made aliens on this planet and we will continue to do so at an increasing pace," he said. "In the last five years we've come to realize that we ...

U-M scientists discover identifying markers for primitive blood-forming stem cells

...ut a hematopoietic stem cell and makes the process simpler and less labor intensive." "Many of the current markers we use to purify HSCs are expressed as a gradient from high to low across the hematopoietic cell hierarchy," says Omer H. Yilmaz, co-first author and a student in the Medical School's M.D./Ph.D...

New antibody shows promise as cure for anthrax

...ment "looks promising" and that it could lead to a simpler and cheaper way to treat anthrax. The new antibody is produced in bacterial cells, rather than the more expensive mammalian cell culture now used to produce anthrax antibodies. Patterson, chair of the Department of Virology and Immunology at SFBR...

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

...of DNA - that the three-letter code evolved from a simpler two-letter code, although Crick thought the difference in number was simply an accident "frozen in time". The University of Bath researchers suggest that the primordial 'doublet' code was read in threes - but with only either the first two 'prefix' ...

The earliest animals had human-like genes

...utionary perspective, it was long assumed that the simpler fly genes would be more ancient. The current study reveals the opposite: early animals already had a lot of introns, and quickly-evolving species like insects have lost most of them. To discover what early animals were like, scientists usually compa...

Mouse genome much more complex than expected

...ce as many genes as threadworms, which have a much simpler structure. 'Our study calls into question the classic view that one gene contains the information for exactly one protein,' Professor Zimmer explains. 'Mammals frequently use the selfsame place on the DNA several times over, as a partial blueprint, s...

Patterns in genome organization may partially explain how microbial cells work

... distributed along the chromosomes of bacteria and simpler organisms also is fundamentally important to how microbial cells operate. In a paper published Jan. 13 online in PLoS Computational Biology, the researchers reported large- and small-scale organizational patterns in the genomes of 135 bacteria rangi...

'Accelerated evolution' converts RNA enzyme to DNA enzyme in vitro

... conveyed from pre-RNA molecules to RNA during the simpler pre-RNA world period. There are several candidates for the initial pre-RNA molecule, all of which have the ability to form base-paired structures with themselves and with RNA. Cross-pairing would allow genetic information to be transferred from th...

Detection of DNA on nanotubes offers new sensing, sequencing technologies

... rapid detection of hazardous biological agents to simpler and more efficient forensic identification. In the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Science, chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Michael Strano and his students reported that single-walled carbon nanotubes coated with DNA could be placed in ...

Warbling whales speak a language all their own

...to analyze bird songs, which are often shorter and simpler in structure than humpback whale songs. The Markov model proved inadequate for the whale song's complex structure. Information theory, in contrast, proved perfect for analyzing humpback whale songs because it provided a quantitative analysis of the...

Cheaper and simpler keyhole surgery

...r function to the surgical robot systems, but in a simpler and cheaper manner. In a test carried out with experienced medical students, the manipulator was compared to the existing (rigid) instruments. This study showed that far fewer actions were needed when using the manipulator and that fewer mistakes wer...

Researchers unravel DNA tangles and enzyme seamstresses

... topoisomerases. How they achieve this feat may be simpler than previously thought, says U of T research. In a study published in the current online issue of Biophysical Journal, researchers used computer simulations to mimic the DNA mess inside the nucleus with a series of billions of linked and unlinked lo...

Lizard 'third eye' sheds light on evolution of color vision

...ecular signals to sense light: those found only in simpler animals, like scallops, and those found only in mo... in human photoreceptors as well as those found in simpler organisms like the scallop, the researchers propose that the lizard's parietal eye photoreceptor cel...

Engineered heart tissue offers insights into irregular heartbeats, defibrillator failure

...n their study, Bursac and his colleagues created a simpler version of cardiac tissue using cells from the heart ventricles of neonatal rats. They transferred the cells into culture dishes on which they had stamped precise patterns of proteins known to support heart tissue growth. The proteins caused the cell...

Salmonella bacteria use RNA to assess and adjust magnesium levels

...o approach such a complex system, we study it in a simpler organism, the Salmonella bacterium." Groisman and his colleagues uncovered the magnesium riboswitch while they were investigating the MgtA gene, which is controlled by the major regulator of Salmonella virulence, the phoP/phoQ system. The MgtA gene...

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