Life Sciences and Chemistry

A single gene appears to kick off a critical step in the development of the early embryo – the formation of the brain and spinal cord – and thus may offer a way to screen for fetal spinal cord defects such as spina bifida.

Neural tube defects, including spina bifida – an open spinal cord – and anencephaly, or lack of a complete brain, are among the most common serious birth defects in the United States. While the incidence has gone down in this country thanks to educational efforts encourag

The potential of new technologies to reveal insights into the fundamental structure and function of biological systems continues to grow rapidly –but the ability to interpret and merge these datasets lags behind the ability to collect it. In an effort to overcome these limitations, Sven Bergmann, Jan Ihmels, and Naama Barkai, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, developed a comparative model that integrates gene expression data from microarrays with genomic sequence information

You might say that caspases are obsessed with death. The primary agents of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, caspases kill cells by destroying proteins that sustain cellular processes. Apoptosis, a highly controlled sequence of events that eliminates dangerous or unnecessary cells, contributes to a wide variety of developmental and physiological processes–in a developing embryo, apoptosis creates the space between fingers and adjusts nerve cell populations to match the number of cells they targe

Moscow biologists have proved that people can use the capability of some plants to protect themselves from vermin insects with the help of biologically active substances.

It has been found that plants can protect themselves from vermin insects. One way is to use substances which the plants synthesise to suppress insects’ hormones activity and to disrupt their development cycle. Having studied the way these substances act, people can try to use these substances for their own purposes.

Microbes are everywhere, but when they are in mined soils, they react with the mineral pyrite to speed up acidification of mine run-off water. Scientists have been trying to understand the chemistry behind this process that eventually leads to widespread acidification of water bodies and deposition of heavy metals. What a new study has found seems to defy the laws of chemistry: microbes react with the pyrite surface, coating it with chemicals that would be expected to hinder further reactions. Despit

ADARs do more than alter codon sequence in RNA

Recent studies at the University of Utah suggest new ways of regulating the behaviors that allow us to smell food, learn, and remember.

Brenda L. Bass, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry at the U School of Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and Leath A. Tonkin, a graduate student in her lab, published their findings in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Science.

With the help of a tiny worm, C. ele