Horseshoe crab studies providing new insight into valuable ancient creatures
... of the Leetown Science Center, says thebay's long stretches of protected, sandy beaches provide ideal habitat forspawning. "What has evolved is a dependence of migratory shorebirds on thesuperabundance of horseshoe crab eggs in Delaware Bay," Dr. Smith says. But in recent years declines in horseshoe crab numb...Genome tools pass big test in fruit flies
...rmation to create softwareprograms that scan large stretches of raw sequence data—the exact order ofthe fo...t where functional genes might lie withinthe large stretches of DNA that have not been well studied. Members of theBDGP’s informatics team organized a works...Cleaner air and less acidification among proposals for new environmental goals
...n only objective, the number of acidifiedlakes and stretches ofwatercourse must be halved in the next ten years. Foreign sources areresponsible for most of theacid rain that falls over Sweden. The EU's "ceiling directive" will reducedepositions but notsufficiently. More international agreement will be necessar...Protein component apparently plays key role in muscle elasticity
...cids. The new work suggests that when the protein stretches within the reversible 6-angstrom-per -domain range, elasticity is controlled by the hydrogen bonds that connect two specific protein strands. The authors of the paper were Piotr E. Marszalek, Hongbin Li, Mariano Carrion-Vazquez, Andres F. Oberhauser ...Nearly identical controls of immune genes in mice and humans hint at new asthma treatment
...h degree of similarity between the mouse and human stretches of DNA that regulate expression of the genes. Thes...hat some "rate-limiting factor is scanning the DNA stretches to find these genes." "The hope is that studies of this mechanism may guide new therapeutic strate......vide stability, while down the hall, Steven Lehman stretches rabbit muscle fibers to find out how they work as brakes and springs as well as motors. Michael Dickinson tracks blowflies in a test chamber to determine how feedback from their eyes affects the flight muscles and ultimately allows spectacular maneuv...Jews are the genetic brothers of Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese
..., and they all share a common genetic lineage that stretches back thousands of years. "Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham," says Harry Ostrer, M.D., Director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, an author of the new study by an international team of resea...The hair of the bear: USGS releases grizzly bear numbers in Glacier National Park
...es -- the northern third of the NCDE, an area that stretches from the southern Canadian border to just north of Missoula, Montana (see http://www.mesc.usgs.gov/glacier/beardna.htm for study site boundaries). Although bear numbers for the park are higher than the previous 1970's estimate of 200 grizzly bears...A new type of mutation in the human genome
...uous duplications arise from recombination between stretches of similar, repeated DNA, noncontiguous duplications must arise through a new mechanism that involves excision of the duplicated portion of DNA and at least three breaks to the DNA. As the chromosomes containing these duplications appear normal, an...DNA details suggest how human chromosomes break, rearrange and cause a genetic disease
... spells out the body's blueprint. These repetitive stretches are called AT rich repeats and are arranged in an unusual configuration called a palindrome. "These palindromic sequences are unstable, and allow us to propose a model for how this translocation occurs," said Beverly S. Emanuel, Ph.D., chief of Human...Intriguing archaeological sites, isolated lake targets of Kuril Expedition
...in July and August in the remote island chain that stretches for about 750 miles between the northern tip of Japan and Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Ted Pietsch, UW fisheries professor and curator of fishes at the UW's Burke Museum, says this is the first Kuril expedition to have a major archaeological compone...What makes cells tick detailed by Dartmouth researchers
...lly positive as well," says Dunlap. In addition, stretches of the white collar proteins resemble those of comparable regulatory proteins in mice and humans. "The wiring is similar, although the molecular biology -- at the level of making protein -- is different," notes Dunlap. "Sequence conservation between ...... identify them the next time. Despite the fished stretches of the two rivers having the same density of trout, the savvy fish from the Owen were far trickier to land. Only 58 were caught in the Owen, compared with 157 in the remote river. Trout in the remote region, which had never encountered anglers befo......g pondered how, inside the nucleus of a cell, long stretches of DNA are moved through the huge enzyme factories that transcribe DNA's genetic information into messages made of RNA. Now, for the first time, a team of scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago has demonstrated the presence of a "mole......g pondered how, inside the nucleus of a cell, long stretches of DNA are moved through the huge enzyme factories that transcribe DNA's genetic information into messages made of RNA. Now, for the first time, a team of scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago has demonstrated the presence of a "molec...Scientists launch the worlds first marine life census
...ent species whose ranges often overlap across wide stretches of the Pacific."While single-species studies such as our Atlantic bluefin tuna project have been performed previously," she notes, "the emphasis now is on a multi-species effort to get a better handle on how a variety of animals interact across the f...DNA "Motors" are key to virus replication
...constructed and suggests how it works to pack long stretches of the virus' genetic material into its outer shell during the process of viral replication. The work was made possible in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), through its Molecular Biophysics program. The results point to new opport...Study reveals structure of DNA packaging motor in virus
...uggests how it works to translocate, or pack, long stretches of the virus' genetic material into its outer shell during the process of viral replication. Details appear in the Dec. 7 issue of the scientific journal Nature. "This study provides the first knowledge of a DNA packaging motor," says Michael Ros......been the much higher percentage of repetitive DNA, stretches of DNA that are not genes but that share the same sequence of base pairs, in human than in other invertebrate genomes. The function of this so-called "junk DNA" has been a mystery. These repetitive elements (transposable elements) are found so freque...