The hidden evolutionary relationship between pigs and primates revealed by genome-wide study of transposable elements

(Phys.org)In the past, geneticists focused primarily on the evolution of genes in order to trace the relationships between species. More recently, genetic elements called SINEs (short interspersed elements) have emerged ...

Invisible to the naked eye, plant-parasitic nematodes are a huge threat to agriculture, causing billions in crop losses every year. Plant scientists at the University of Missouri and the University of Bonn in Germany have ...

A team including the scientist who first harnessed the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 system for mammalian genome editing has now identified a different CRISPR system with the potential for even simpler and more precise genome ...

A team of scientists at the University of Washington and the biotechnology company Illumina have created an innovative tool to directly detect the delicate, single-molecule interactions between DNA and enzymatic proteins. ...

To feed the world's burgeoning population, producers must grow crops in more challenging terrain where plant roots must cope with barriers. To that end, Cornell University physicists and Boyce Thompson Institute plant ...

(Phys.org)'Brains, Genes, and Primates' is the title of a curious perspective article recently published in the journal Neuron. In it, a who's who of dignitaries and luminaries from the field of neuroscience toss out a ...

Along the northern edge of the Gulf of Mexico is a 6,000-square mile dead zone of oxygen-depleted water filled with dead plants, dead fish and a damaged ecosystem.

A team of scientists from the University of California, Riverside and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Philippines, recently published a study unlocking the secret to just how rice seeds might be able ...

Stanford researchers have ripped the guts out of a virus and totally redesigned its core to repurpose its infectious capabilities into a safe vehicle for delivering vaccines and therapies directly where they are needed.

(Phys.org)In sub-Saharan Africa, few agricultural parasites are as devastating to a wide variety of crops as Striga hermonthica, commonly known as witchweed. It chokes out such staple crops as sorghum, millet and rice, ...

(Phys.org)Coral reefs are the most diverse marine ecosystems, biodiversity hotspots now under anthropogenic threat from climate change, ocean acidification and pollution. Efforts are underway to protect and expand shrinking ...

The world population, which stood at 2.5 billion in 1950, is predicted to increase to 10.5 billion by 2050. It's a stunning number since it means the planet's population has doubled within the lifetimes of many people alive ...

(Phys.org)What have viruses ever done for humans? The question is debatable, but given the prevalence of highly contagious, and sometimes life-threatening illnesses caused by viruses, it's fair to say that most people ...

Forget the Vulcan mind-meld of the Star Trek generationas far as mind control techniques go, bacteria is the next frontier.

Overcoming limitations of super-resolution microscopy to optimize imaging of RNA in living cells is a key motivation for physics graduate student Takuma Inoue, who works in the lab of MIT assistant professor of physics Ibrahim ...

For thousands of years, people have used yeast to ferment wine, brew beer and leaven bread.

(Phys.org)Rice is one of the most important staple crops grown by humansvery possibly the most important in history. With 4.3 billion inhabitants, Asia is home to 60 percent of the world's population, so it's unsurprising ...

A gene that helps plants to remain healthy during times of stress has been identified by researchers at Oxford University. Its presence helps plants to tolerate environmental pressures like droughtand it could help create ...

China's struggle - mirrored across the globeto balance public concern over the safety of genetically modified (GM) crops with a swelling demand for affordable food crops has left a disconnect: In China's case, shrinking ...

A gene that triggers remodeling of neural circuits in C. elegans during development has been identified by Michael Francis, PhD, associate professor of neurobiology. The study, details of which were published in Current Biology, ...

Researchers are able to clone domestic animals using various techniques, including embryo splitting and nuclear transfer, but the expense and inherent inefficiencies of most cloning processes have limited procedures to research ...

Research teams from the University of Valencia and the University of Tours have discovered that genes originating from parasitic wasps are present in the genomes of many butterflies. These genes were acquired through a wasp-associated ...

If you go back far enough, all people share a common ancestry. But some populations are more closely related than others based on events in the past that brought them together. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press ...

(Phys.org)Human genomic diversity studies provide a window to population movements across regions and societies throughout history. Generally, South America has been underrepresented in such studies, but recognizing that ...

The burgeoning field of optogenetics has seen another breakthrough with the creation of a new plant-human hybrid protein molecule called OptoSTIM1. In South Korea, a research team led by Won Do Heo, associate professor at ...

A new study from researchers at Uppsala University shows that variation in genome size may be much more important than previously believed. It is clear that, at least sometimes, a large genome is a good genome.

The face of a chimpanzee is decidedly different from that of a human, despite the fact that the apes are our nearest relative in the primate tree. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have begun to ...

What has spoiled tens upon tens of thousands of fledgling oil palm plants at elite corporate plantations in Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia over the last three decades? The answer to this problem, which has cost ...

Fans of homebrewed beer and backyard distilleries already know how to employ yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. But a research team led by bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, has gone much further by ...

(Phys.org)In the complex, somewhat rarified world of interactions between various flavors of RNA, one elusive goal is to understand the precise regulatory relationships between competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA), microRNA ...

A study on a sorghum population at Kansas State University has helped researchers better understand why a crop hybrid often performs better than either of its parent lines, known as heterosis.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system has been in the limelight mainly as a revolutionary genome engineering tool used to modify specific gene sequences within the vast sea of an organism's DNA. Cas9, a naturally occurring protein in the ...

University of Adelaide research has shown for the first time that, despite not having a nervous system, plants use signals normally associated with animals when they encounter stress.

Genes that express in precisely timed patterns, known as oscillatory genes, play an essential role in development functions like cell division, circadian rhythms and limb formation. But without a time-lapse view of genetic ...

Hand-written letters and printed photos seem quaint in today's digital age. But there's one thing that traditional media have over hard drives: longevity. To address this modern shortcoming, scientists are turning to DNA ...

Barley, a widely grown cereal grain commonly used to make beer and other alcoholic beverages, possesses a large and highly repetitive genome that is difficult to fully sequence. Now a team led by scientists at the University ...

Researchers in Canada and the U.K. have for the first time sequenced and assembled de novo the full genome of a living organism, the bacteria Escherichia Coli, using Oxford Nanopore's MinION device, a genome sequencer that ...

Researchers at the University of Georgia have used a gene editing tool known as CRISPR/Cas to modify the genome of a tree species for the first time. Their research, published recently in the early online edition of the journal ...

High salt in soil dramatically stresses plant biology and reduces the growth and yield of crops. Now researchers have found specific proteins that allow plants to grow better under salt stress, and may help breed future generations ...

Growing the right number of vertebrae in the right places is an important job and scientists have found the molecules that act like 'theatre directors' for vertebrae genes in mice: telling them how much or how little ...

Ten thousand years ago, a golden grain got naked, brought people together and grew to become one of the top agricultural commodities on the planet.

One of the enduring mysteries of the human experience is how and why humans moved from hunting and gathering to farming.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have for the first time created and used a nanoscale vehicle made of DNA to deliver a CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool into ...

Nitrogen and phosphate nutrients are among the biggest costs in cultivating algae for biofuels. Sandia molecular biologists Todd Lane and Ryan Davis have shown they can recycle about two-thirds of those critical nutrients, ...

Mosquitoes are a key contributor to the spread of potentially deadly diseases such as dengue and malaria, as they harbor parasites and viruses that are spread when mosquitoes bite humans and animals. Now, researchers at the ...

Natural selection is a race to reproduce, a competition between individuals with varying traits that helps direct the evolution of a species. As scientists begin to explore the complex networks of genes that shape the form ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers at British company Oxitec has developed a genetic approach to controlling diamondback moth caterpillars and report that trials in greenhouse conditions has gone so well that they are ready ...

A new technology that will dramatically enhance investigations of epigenomes, the machinery that turns on and off genes and a very prominent field of study in diseases such as stem cell differentiation, inflammation and cancer, ...

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