Trait

Searching the depths of the straits of Florida for disease cures

On Monday, the Harbor Branch drug discovery group will begin a 2-week expedition to explore the Straits of Florida in search of organisms that produce chemicals with the potential to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's. The work will include the first submersible exploration of the remote Cay Sal Bank, which encompasses a number of small, uninhabited islands 30 miles north of Cuba. Cay S...

Resveratrol prolongs lifespan and delays onset of aging-related traits in a short-lived vertebrate

By studying a particularly short-lived fish species, researchers have been able to show that a natural compound previously shown to extend lifespan in non-vertebrate organisms can also do so in at least one vertebrate species. The findings, reported by Alessandro Cellerino of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and colleagues, support the potential utility of the compound in human aging research....

ASU researchers find link between social behavior, maternal traits in bees

One of the puzzling questions in the evolution of bees is how some species developed social behaviors. Arizona State University Life Sciences associate professor Gro Amdam thinks part of the answer can be traced back to bee reproductive traits. A paper describing Amdam's experiments, "Complex social behavior derived from maternal reproductive traits," is the cover story of the current iss...

Malaria, potato famine pathogen share surprising trait

Two wildly different pathogens ?one that infects vegetables, the other infecting humans - essentially use the same protein code to get their disease-causing proteins into the cells of their respective hosts. That's what researchers from Ohio State and Northwestern universities report in a study published in the current issue of the journal PLoS Pathogens. The scientists were surprised to l...

Can biological traits predict diversification rates in birds?

Why do some taxanomic families contain many species and others contain far fewer? There has been much debate in the scientific community over the reason for such variation, but a recent study in The American Naturalist by Albert B. Phillimore (Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus), Robert P. Freckleton (Oxford University), C. David L. Orme (Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus),...

Zebra finch males prefer females with exaggerated maternal traits

Researchers have demonstrated that learning about the appearance of their parents may give birds a preference for mates with exaggerated parental traits, rather than traits that more exactly match those of their parents. Such learned mate preferences may help drive the evolution of exaggerated traits and strong morphological differences between sexes ?phenomena seen frequently in birds and other...

Mutant mice show key autism traits

While the causes of autism remain complex and mysterious, researchers are steadily adding pieces to its intricate puzzle. In what they believe to be a significant new approach to understanding "autism spectrum disorders" (ASD), researchers have developed a mouse that shows abnormal social interactions and brain hypertrophy characteristic of the disease. In an article in the May 4, 2006, Ne...

Researchers make progress in studying genetic traits of India-born populations

Despite the fact that the people of India constitute more than one-sixth of the world's entire population, they have been underrepresented in studies related to genetic diseases. And with the growth of modernization, complex genetic diseases associated with urban and western lifestyles have risen to near-epidemic proportions, making genetic cataloging and association studies of particular importa...

40,000-year-old skull shows both modern human and Neandertal traits

Humans continued to evolve significantly long after they were established in Europe, and interbred with Neandertals as they settled across the continent, according to new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) USA. Professor Joao Zilhao of the University of Bristol, Professor Erik Trinkaus of Washington University and colleagues in Europe...

Scientists seek useful traits in wild cottons

If you have Mom's smile, Dad's eyes and Grandpa's laugh, you might wonder what other traits you picked up from the genealogic fabric of the ol' family tree. "Cotton genetic diversity has narrowed in recent yea...