Soils offer new hope as carbon sink
...t in a technology to create clean energy that also locks up carbon in the soil for the long term and lifts agricultural production," he said. The trials at Wollongbar have focused on the benefits of agrichar to agricultural productivity. "When applied at 10t/ha, the biomass of wheat was tripled and of so...Mechanism of microRNAs deciphered
...t bind to messenger RNAs that do. They function as locks for messenger RNAs and prevent their translation into proteins, but how they bring about this effect and at which stage of protein synthesis they interfere is a long-standing puzzle. "So far it has been impossible to directly examine how and when m...Leicester researcher to lead global team tackling carbon 'time-bomb'
...nd is a vast, globally-important carbon sink which locks away the greenhouse gas CO2. But once the carbon allocation to the system is discontinued by forest removal and the peat is drained, the surface peat oxidises and loses stored carbon rapidly to the atmosphere. This results in progressive subsidence ...A new tool against brain disease
...ceptors and not others like a key that opens some locks but not others it has great potential as a tool for precisely identifying the shape and structure of the receptor "locks," thus making it easier to design new medicines or "keys" to fit those receptors and trigger them to release desired neurotransm...One-dimensional diffusion accelerates molecular motors
...diffusion movement along the microtubule, until it locks into place at its end (Nature, May 4, 2006). This discovery is important for understanding cellular life processes like cell division and nerve cell growth. When cells divide, they build a giant apparatus - the so called the "mitotic spindle". It is ...Animals can change genes quickly to keep up with viral ingenuity
...ves. Animals and plants have a number of different locks and codes that help to keep the viruses out, but viruses are capable of evolving new ways of breaking the codes extremely quickly. The new research shows that genes controlling a part of the immune system that fights viruses actually evolve much fast...New microscope allows scientists to track a functioning protein with atomic-level precision
...jiggle back and forth. Each incoming DNA base then locks the enzyme into the forward position so that it cannot jiggle backwards. "It would be as if you were repeatedly bouncing off a wall, and every time you happened to bounce a bit farther away, somebody came in and moved the wall up behind you, so you ...Solving the mystery of mutated proteins and the brain
...activity of the "business part of the protein" and locks it into a shape that causes the protein to accumulate to toxic levels in cells. Studying the action of ataxin-1 in mice and fruit flies gave her the answer. Putting the abnormal protein with 80 repeats into mice forces degeneration of special neurons...Slipping past the blood brain barrier: Research shows potential treatment for brain cancer
...her cells, too. That's why the blood brain barrier locks them out of the brain." The research was done in collaboration with investigators at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, including Nobel Laureate Andrew V. Schally, Ph.D. Dr. Banks said the findings are promising because they show a...How HIV disables the cells' call for help
...mmune response as well. Indeed, they found that FP locks on to several proteins on the cell walls that are involved in invoking a large-scale immune response, effectively shutting them down. From their new understanding of how a tiny virus can gain control of the body's immune response, the scientists mad...Rodent social behavior encoded in junk DNA
...vasopressin thus depends upon which rooms have the locks and our research shows that the distribution of the receptors is determined by the length of the microsatellites." Prairie voles with the long version have more receptors in circuits for social recognition, so release of vasopressin during social en...Gene keeps neural cells on correct developmental path
... Since then, they and others have found that REST locks down neuronal genes in other cells by grabbing onto the DNA and cementing in other molecules, an arrangement that stays intact as non-neuronal cells differentiate into liver, muscle, and other tissues. The new study reports that REST uses a differen......cork, rendering it useless. "The enzymes are like locks made by the same locksmith, but varied slightly to open with different keys. The cancer drug fits AChE like a key that slides in part way, but won't turn," says Sussman. "As far as we know, this is the first time the side effect of a drug has been ob......hole, giving her further clues as to how the virus locks onto the cell membrane. The retrovirus used by Fass and the team is similar to that which causes leukemia in humans. They hope, with further research, to understand the conformational changes the envelope protein complex undergoes as it works, and t...... pieces together," for example, that they fit like locks and keys, he says. Rose believes birds perfect their songs because they start combining various song segments and retain only those pairs (AB, BC, CD, DE) that match the memory of what they are tutored and reject others (such as AC or EC) that are ......ising and lowering of water levels in the shipping locks under a nearby bridge created waves that jostled the aquifer. But over the course of this study, a flow from the river has always been balanced with a counterflow from the aquifer that keeps the chemicals in place. Svitana wan...