Life Sciences and Chemistry

Researchers looking inside a pathogenic soil bacterium have found an organelle, a subcellular pouch, existing independently from the plasma membrane. The discovery within a prokaryotic organism challenges the theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles and suggests a targeted approach to killing many disease-causing organisms.

“The organelle we found in the bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens is practically identical to the organelle called acidocalcisome in unicellular eukaryotes,” said R

Many of the body’s responses to large changes in environmental light are controlled by a newly discovered light detection system in the eye, scientists report today.

Researchers from the UK, Canada, the USA and Germany reveal that the eye’s brightness detection system helps set the body’s internal clock, regulate general activity levels and control the size of the pupil.

The new brightness detector system is based upon a molecule sensitive to blue light called opsin,

Long ago genetic engineering got deep reach into pharmacological and food industry, agriculture and medicine. The trees are no exclusion, but genetic engineers started to deal with them approximately ten years later than with other objects: the trees are too difficult for genetic investigations and manipulations. The wood plant genetic engineering activities are now in full swing in different countries of the world, including Russia. When improving trees through classical selection methods, the resea

Many creatures including our fellow primates the New World Monkeys rely on highly specific scent molecules called pheromones to find a suitable mate. Even our humble mammal cousin, the mouse, was found to have 140 genes just for pheromone receptors when its genome was completely sequenced earlier this year.

But humans are clueless when it comes to pheromone signals, according to University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Jianzhi “George” Zhang. He believes color vision put our pheromones

Some people can burn the midnight oil, while others might prefer to tackle their challenges early in the morning. Although most people know instinctively if they are an ‘evening’ or ‘morning’ person, scientists have now discovered why we fall into a certain category.

Scientists at the University of Surrey, in co-operation with clinical colleagues at St Thomas’’s Hospital (London) and Hospital de Gelderse Vallei (Netherlands), have discovered a correlation between a difference in th

Putting to rest years of controversy, an international research team led by Johns Hopkins scientists has discovered that the eye’s job of detecting light is most likely carried out by just three cell types.

Writing in the June 15 advance online section of Nature, the team reports that rods, cones and special retinal cells that make a protein called melanopsin together account for the entirety of a mouse’s reaction to light levels. Others have proposed a role for cells that make proteins cal