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Tag: "tricky" at biology news

Achilles heel of the herpes virus possibly found

... its role and studying the HSV entry mechanism was tricky and near impossible until Fuller's team discovered a type of pig kidney cell that isn't vulnerable to infection by human herpes virus. They searched the genome library to find genes essential to HSV infection, isolated the B5-coding sequence, and fig...

Cracking the perception code

...eurons' firing patterns are complex, and it's been tricky to tease out "which component of the neuronal activity was more likely associated with behavioral performance," he explained. Theoretically, there are many ways in which neurons could relay information about stimulus frequency, Romo said. Frequency ...

For one Stanford doctor, the beat goes on during open-heart surgery

...patient." Despite its reputation as a technically tricky procedure, beating-heart surgery has garnered rene...ient. When he lifted the heart out of the chest, a tricky step in the beating-heart procedure, the doctors and nurses and technologists in the room turned sud...

The closest look ever at the cell's machines

...Investigating protein complexes has always posed a tricky problem ?they're too small to be studied by microscopes, and generally too large to be studied by techniques like X-ray crystallography," says Russell. "But they play such a crucial role in the cell that we need to fill in this gap. There's still a h...

AIDS drug from sunflowers

...substance, albeit only with great difficulty. 'The tricky bit is transferring the caffeoyl groups to the quinic acid,' Ralf Theisen says. 'The plants probably only have one enzyme, which acts as a catalyst for this transfer. If we can find the construction manual for this enzyme, i.e. the corresponding gene...

Uncovering sex-change secrets of black sea bass

... make breeding and growing the fish in captivity a tricky proposition. "Black sea bass is a wonderful fish to culture and to eat," says George Nardi, vice president and director of GreatBay Aquaculture, a commercial fish farm in Newington, NH. But the sex change problem must be tackled if fish farmers are...

K-Staters design and build a low-cost remote sensing tool for environmental studies

...many possibilities for collecting reliable data in tricky or dangerous settings, such as studying dispersal of a smoke plume during a prairie fire; checking smokestack emissions; counting livestock in the pens at a feedlot; or checking crop fields for problem areas, for example. "We keep thinking of new ci...

Nice guys do finish first in lizards' evolutionary race

...urface to be counterproductive. "Cooperation is a tricky thing in terms of evolutionary theory," said Andrew McAdam, an assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife and zoology at Michigan State University and one of the paper's authors. "The question then is why do some organisms cooperate when it seems ...

Emotional control circuit of brain's fear response discovered

...ated/controlled in the brain." To accomplish the tricky task of studying fear in the brain, she turned to a method described in the Dec. 2005 Nature Neuroscience. In a paper featured on the cover of this journal, Dr. Hirsch and Tobias Egner, a post-doctoral researcher in her lab, described how the Stroop...

Small, smaller, smallest -- The plight of the vaquita

...or indices must be obtained to monitor trends is a tricky one. Ship surveys are expensive and they cannot be expected to detect population declines or increases on an acceptable timescale for such a critically endangered species. According to one analysis, a single survey in 2006 or 2007 would have a probab...

Genetic surprise confirms neglected 70-year-old evolutionary hypothesis

...ogist H. Allen Orr. Crossbreeding the flies proved tricky because a few million years of evolution separated the species, but after a few nudges the flies produced what Masly was looking for--a sterile male. This is when Dobzhansky's 70-year-old hypothesis nearly died for good. The reigning theory of spec...

New cell type identified in cancer development

...use they are rather unstable, they are notoriously tricky to isolate and describe. They are also resistant to virtually any kind of treatment, and some scientists believe they are the reason cancer recurs. Until now, no one has known how they arise. But a team of scientists, led by Dr. Jian-Xin Gao, a r...

Fighting to keep Darwin in the classroom

...us leaders have grasped the political power of the tricky ideas of 'intelligent design.' For such a project, education is the main pathway." ...

Genome of Clostridium botulinum reveals the background to world's deadliest toxin

...t have subtle tools to evade our human defences or tricky methods of acquiring resistance to antibiotics. It lives either as a dormant spore or as a scavenger of decaying animal materials in the soil, and doesn’t interact with human or other large animal hosts for prolonged periods of time. Occasionally ...

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