Science - Biology latest news

Genetics and random environmental factors each play a major role in determining both gay and heterosexual behavior, say British and Swedish researchers.

Two Texas A&M university researchers have developed a computational tool that will help scientists more accurately study complex units of clustered genes, called operons, in bacteria. The tool, which allows scientists to analyze many bacterial genomes at once, is more accurate than previous methods because it starts from experimentally validated data instead of from statistical predictions, they say.

When chemists want to produce a lot of a substance -- such as a newly designed drug -- they often turn to catalysts, molecules that speed chemical reactions. Many jobs require highly specialized catalysts, and finding one in just the right shape to connect with certain molecules can be difficult. Natural catalysts, such as enzymes in the human body that help us digest food, get around this problem by shape-shifting to suit the task at hand.

Researchers at North Carolina State university have found that quantum dot nanoparticles can penetrate the skin if there is an abrasion, providing insight into potential workplace concerns for healthcare workers or individuals involved in the manufacturing of quantum dots or doing research on potential biomedical applications of the tiny nanoparticles.

A group of undergraduate students from the university of California San Diego have forged a new area of bioinformatics that may improve genomic and proteomic annotations and unlock a collection of stubborn biological mysteries. Their work will be published in the July issue of the journal Genome Research.

Thanks to salt and hot chili peppers, researchers have found a calculus-computing center that tells a roundworm to go forward toward dinner or turn to broaden the search. It's a computational mechanism, they say, that is similar to what drives hungry college students to a pizza.

An international consortium of Crohn's disease researchers has combined data from three independent studies to identify 21 new genetic variants associated with the inflammatory bowel disorder, bringing the ...

(Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) Dutch Rubicon laureate Chris Smit has concluded that small mammals, such as rabbits and mice, play a major role in the development of natural diversity. Smit researched how scrub becomes established in natural grassland. It seems that prickly shrubs are important in protecting plants and preventing animal species from grazing. Smit has also demonstrated that natural disturbances such as flooding and animal diseases are very important for the diversity of natural areas.

(Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) Dutch ecologist Marijke van Kuijk has studied the regeneration of the tropical forest in Vietnam. Abandoned agricultural land does regenerate to tropical forest, but only slowly. Two procedures are used to help nature along: pruning of foliage to free up space for trees and planting the desired tree species. Van Kuijk used the PHOLIAGE model to calculate the appropriate measures.

Background: Sequencing and annotation of several mammalian genomes have revealed that segmental duplications are a common architectural feature of primate genomes; in fact, about 5% of the human genome is comprised of large blocks of interspersed segmental duplications. These segmental duplications have been implicated in genomic copy-number variation, gene novelty, and various genomic disorders. However, the molecular processes involved in the evolution and regulation of duplicated sequences remain largely unexplored. Results: In this study, the profile of about 20 histone modifications within human segmental duplications was characterized using high-resolution, genome-wide data derived from a ChIP-Seq study. The analysis demonstrated that derivative loci of segmental duplications often differ significantly from the original with respect to many histone methylations. Further investigation showed that genes are present 3x more frequently in the original than in the derivative, whereas