Serotonin metabolites in mollusks suggest pathways for human therapies
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- From mollusks to mammals, newly discovered chemical pathways of ...sible that the role of serotonin sulfate in marine mollusks is similar to melatonin, which resests the circadian clock in humans, Stuart and colleagues suggeste...Broken arms and collateral damage: clues to predator-driven evolution
... Around the same time, some 380 million years ago, mollusks and other shell-bearing marine animals developed better protective devices, such as more spines or more tightly-coiled shells. Apparently, the prevalence of shell-crushers prompted development of better defenses against them. But simply finding evide...Mutant mice lead to memory insights
...or many functions including memory in animals from mollusks to humans. CBP is a particularly hard-working protein. It serves as a molecular scaffold that helps assemble the machinery of gene transcription known to be necessary for formation of long-term memories. And critically, CBP acts as an enzyme that tr...Fish no exception to trend in marine-organism disease
...reasing in some taxa, such as in turtles, mammals, mollusks and urchins, but declining in fish. However, says Jessica Ward, a Cornell doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of the published study, "Disease in fish populations is decreasing only because their numbers are decreasi...Report in BioScience details global decline of nonmarine mollusks
...orld's most endangered group of animals nonmarine mollusks (that is, terrestrial and freshwater mollusks). Th...er of turtle species. Furthermore, nonmarine mollusks have the dubious honor of having the highest number of documented extinctions of any major taxonomic...Feeder-free system for maintaining pluripotency in embryonic stem cells pioneered
...urified compound from the purple dye of marine red mollusks -- called 6-bromoindirubin-3'-oxime, or by its working acronym, "BIO"-- has been shown by Rockefeller scientists to indirectly activate a crucial gene expression mechanism, called the Wnt signaling pathway, in embryonic cells. Wnt signaling occurs wh...Bush Administration plan to reduce global warming could devastate sea life
...eibel said. Shallow-living organisms like shelled mollusks and corals are already being affected by the growing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. As atmospheric CO2 diffuses into the upper layers of the water, it inhibits the ability of shellfish to form shells and causes coral reefs to dissolve. Deep-sea ...Invading weeds escaped old enemies, brought immunity
...A parallel study of invasive animals, ranging from mollusks to mammals, reported in the same issue of Nature as "Introduced species and their missing parasites" by ecologists at the University of California-Santa Barbara and Princeton University, reached similar conclusions about aliens' success in new land...URI biological oceanographers test shallow marine systems' response to increased nutrients
...ificantly increased the presence of filter feeding mollusks in nitrogen-enriched tanks, and the water of the tanks remained clear, the eelgrass still responded by developing longer leaves and little below-ground material. Nixon and his team concluded that the development of long leaves at the expense of root...May media highlights: GEOLOGY and GSA TODAY
...pid first appearance of euryhaline (Mediterranean) mollusks on Black Sea shelves at ~7.5 ka. However, this paper proposes that the colonization was not a consequence of catastrophic flooding but rather the outcome of a slow establishment of two-way flow in the Bosphorus and a time lag during which the fresher...Sea Grant news: Shipworms, ozone, hurricanes
...tes of the sea, are not actually worms, but marine mollusks similar to clams. They have long, worm-like bodies with greatly reduced shells at the end. The floating larvae bore tiny holes on the surface of woody materials, and the adults use their shells to create larger tunnels inside the wood. Damage is o...Clues from analysis of fish bones supports theory of climate shift 5000 years ago, onset of El Nio
...es. Some critics of that paper suggested that the mollusks might have lived in warm water embayments that would not accurately reflect temperatures in the open ocean. "The evidence in this paper, based on fish that live off shore, strongly supports the conclusions that we reached in 1996," says Sandweiss. ...Meeting ecological and societal needs for freshwater
...any of the pollutants found in water, a decline in mollusks can lead to dirtier water, which can in turn threaten the well-being of other species. Tools are available to restore aquatic ecosystems to a more natural and sustainable state, but are not being widely applied, according to the ESA paper. New stati...Rensselaer effort to pull mussels at Lake George looks promising
... volunteers began manually pulling the troublesome mollusks from the water. The time-consuming, labor-intensive effort appears to be paying off. In the spring of last year, shortly after the first adult zebra mussels were discovered in the popular recreational lake, divers collected more than 19,000 of them....URI professor investigates the muscle behind blue mussels
... you get the idea that life for these hard-shelled mollusks is quite dramatic. If hanging on to a rock in the intertidal zone while waves come and go isnt enough, the blue mussel faces the threat of being ripped off its rocky perch by violent storms or hurricanes. And now comes global warming, which is making......ls found in the delta. Even after adding all small mollusks and all shelled nonmollusk macrofauna to life forms being counted, the current density of the benthos (18 per square meter) is only 36 percent of the density during the times when the river flowed to the delta, according to the report. Since shel...Researchers expand dating of marine animals to brachiopods
... have expanded the dating of marine animals beyond mollusks to brachiopods, and the method has been shown to w... have been on the environment over time." Although mollusks such as clams have been used for amino-acid dating, using brachiopods is new. Most previously studie...Tiny RNA may be universal regulator of developmental timing in animals
...tory RNA also is expressed only at later stages in mollusks and annelid worms and is absent in more primitive animals - such as jellyfish, coral, and sponge - and in non-animal species (plants and microbes). The team also found that the major RNA target of let-7 RNA is also conserved in flies and zebrafish, ......emperatures and left a permanent record, while the mollusks didn't make it to the other side of the boundary." Ivany plans to continue her work on Eocene and Oligocene climate and how it relates to extinction events. She will extend the study, applying the same techniques on both otoliths and mollusk shell......emperatures and left a permanent record, while the mollusks didn't make it to the other side of the boundary." Ivany plans to continue her work on Eocene/Oligocene climate and how it relates to extinction events. She will extend the study, applying the same techniques on both otoliths and mollusk shells, to d...