Life Sciences and Chemistry

Tube worms living at deep-sea oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico significantly alter their habitat, similar to beavers altering the flow of a river. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have just published an important finding in the journal Ecology Letters.

A computer model of tube worm aggregations was created for Lamellibrachia luymesi, which is among the longest lived animals known. Both actual and model populations persist for centuries and take up high quantities of sulfide fro

North Carolina State University poultry scientists have developed a powerful new tool to aid the understanding of how chicken embryos develop.

The research of Dr. Paul Mozdziak, assistant professor of poultry science, and Dr. James Petitte, professor of poultry science, resulted in successfully transferring a gene into a chicken and establishing a line of chickens carrying that specific marker gene.

Currently, the chick embryo is often used as a model to understand normal a

A lack of oxygen in waters around the world could be doing more than just suffocating fish: It may be acting as an endocrine disruptor and impeding their ability to reproduce, posing a serious threat to the survival of many populations.

A new study of carp suggests that hypoxia, or oxygen deficiency, is an endocrine disruptor. The findings add a surprising member to the growing list of potential hormone-disturbing agents — a list that includes pesticides such as atrazine and DDT, various typ

Genetically altered bacterial viruses appear to be more effective than naked DNA in eliciting an immune response and could be a new strategy for a next generation of vaccines that are easy to produce and store, say researchers from Moredun Research Institute in the United Kingdom.

“In theory, millions of doses can be grown within a matter of days using simple equipment, media and procedures,” says John March, one of lead researchers presenting findings at the American Society for Microbiol

Fndings in mice hold implications for human disorders

New research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers an important contribution to a new wave of thinking in genetics: the idea that not all human disease states are due to alterations in DNA sequence.

A growing body of research on these “epigenetic” changes are leading geneticists to rethink the conventional view that all human disease is fundamentally tied to DNA sequence variation (changes in the actua

Studying mice, scientists from Johns Hopkins have successfully prevented a molecular event in brain cells that they’ve found is required for storing spatial memories. Unlike regular mice, the engineered rodents quickly forgot where to find a resting place in a pool of water, the researchers report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell.

The experiments are believed to be the first to prove that subtly altering the chemistry of a certain protein can profoundly affect a brain cell&#146