Life Sciences and Chemistry

Maybe you really are what you eat. This would solve the long-time mystery of why so many of Guam’s Chamorro people – up to a third per village — suffered a devastating neurological disease. A new study suggests that they gorged on flying fox bats that in turn had feasted on neurotoxin-laden cycad seeds.

“Through the consumption of cycad-fed flying foxes, the Chamorro people may have unwittingly ingested large quantities of cycad neurotoxins,” say Clark Monson of the University of Hawaii,

A group of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has solved structures of a bacterial protein called pilin, which is required for infection by pathogens that cause human diseases like meningitis, gonorrhea, diarrheal diseases, pneumonia, and cholera.

In the latest issue of the journal Molecular Cell, the TSRI group reports two key structures of these pilins and discoveries about their assembly into fibrous “pili.” Because a whole class of bacterial pathogens require the ass

Mice without Fkbp6 gene have significantly reduced testes, completely lack sperm cells

A gene that belongs to a family of genes implicated in heart disease has been found to be essential for male fertility but has no impact on female fertility, researchers at U of T, along with colleagues in New York and Japan, have discovered.

“This gene – Fkbp6 – is a member of a family of genes that have been implicated in immunosuppression and heart disease,” says Dr. Josef Penninger, pr

Butterfly flight simulator sheds light on epic migration

During their winter migration to Mexico, monarch butterflies depend on an internal clock to help them navigate in relation to the sun, scientists have found.

By studying monarchs inside a specially designed flight simulator, the researchers have gathered what they believe is the first direct evidence of the essential role of the circadian clock in celestial navigation. The study appears in the journal Science, publishe

The identification and duplication of a gene that controls production of plants’ outermost protective coating may allow Purdue University researchers to create crops with increased drought resistance.

Scientists cloned the gene WAX2 after they discovered a fast-wilting mutant of Arabidopsis, a commonly used experimental plant. The gene is directly associated with the synthesis of the protective layer of plants, called the cuticle, and its contained waxes, according to the study publ

A study of a common wild mouse by two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists has found evidence of dramatic evolutionary change in a span of just 150 years, suggesting genetic evolution can occur a lot faster than many had thought possible.
The findings are the first report of such quick evolution in a mammal and appear in the May 22 issue of the journal Nature.

Oliver Pergams, a conservation biology researcher with the Chicago Zoological Society in Brookfield, Ill. and visiting