Life Sciences and Chemistry

Eavesdropping among animals influences their behavior, Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Louisville, has found.

Dugatkin and a colleague, Ryan Earley of Georgia State University, studied eavesdropping among male swordtail fish they placed in an experimental tank. They put two fish on one side of a partition and a lone observer male on the other. In some cases, the partitions were clear and in others, opaque.

The fish that could observe their potential adve

Why live in a glass house? For diatoms — tiny ocean-dwelling organisms that live in exquisitely ornate glass cases — the benefit turns out to be enormous.

In a paper published in the Sept. 13 issue of Science, Princeton scientists show that diatoms probably depend on glass to survive because the material facilitates photosynthesis. However, their study suggests that this domestic arrangement has a much bigger beneficiary: the entire planet, which owes its present-day, oxygen-rich and carbo

Using x-ray crystallography, researchers have produced the first images of a large molecular complex that helps shape and load the small, bubble-like vesicles that transport newly formed proteins in the cell. Understanding vesicle “budding” is one of the prerequisites for learning how proteins and other molecules are routed to their correct destinations in the cell.

In an article published in the September 19, 2002, issue of the journal Nature, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investi

Knowing an organism’s genome is good, but knowing what turns on its genes is even better.

Scientists have long searched for triggers that activate ribonucleic acid (RNA), a key component in gene expression. Now, in the Thursday, Sept. 19 issue of the journal Nature, scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that they have found an enzyme that activates RNA, which could lead to new ways of regulating genetic information.

“One of the big questions in molecular

Two scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have described how a plant grown in their laboratory uses two sets of proteins to detect the seasons so that it can flower at the right time. And by tinkering with those proteins, the scientists were able to make the plant flower at will.

“We have demonstrated, for the first time, how plants can anticipate the seasons so that they can flower appropriately,” says Marcelo Yanovsky, Ph.D., who is a research associate at TSRI and the lead

A new method to make very small patterns of DNA molecules on surfaces has been developed by chemists at the University of California, Davis, and Wayne State University, Detroit. The technique could allow faster and more powerful devices for DNA sequencing, biological sensors and disease diagnosis.

The technique, called nanografting, can be used to make patterns of DNA that are up to a thousand times smaller than those in commercially available microarrays, said UC Davis chemist Gang-yu Liu