Life Sciences and Chemistry

Biologists at Vanderbilt and the University of Missouri have uncovered what could be a major clue into the mysterious molecular processes that direct cells to the correct locations within a developing embryo.

Understanding the molecular basis of these processes, and how they can go wrong, may ultimately lead to treatments for many birth defects, such as spina bifida that afflicts between 800 to 1,000 babies born each year in the United States.

Writing in the August issue of the sc

To make an omelet, you need to break some eggs. Not nearly so well known is that breaking eggs also can lead to new information about the evolution of birds and dinosaurs, a topic of hot debate among leading biologists.

Drs. Alan Feduccia and Julie Nowicki of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have done just that. They opened a series of live ostrich eggs at various stages of development and found what they believe is proof that birds could not have descended from dinosaurs. Th

Commercial fishing practices can reduce genetic diversity in fish populations, possibly threatening their productivity and adaptability to environmental change, new research has found.

An Australian zoologist now at the University of Melbourne, along with colleagues from the United Kingdom and New Zealand, was the first to record a decline in the genetic diversity of a commercially exploited marine species.

Their findings, published in the latest volume of the “Proceedings of the

Birds may have a basic understanding of physics, recent research by Oxford zoologists suggests. In an article to be published in Science this week [Thursday], the researchers report the findings of an experiment in which New Caledonian crows bent wires to make hooks appropriate to retrieve food from a cylinder. This is the first time any animal has been found to show some understanding of cause and effect, and to make a new tool for a specific task.

The experiment built on a chance observat

Dartmouth Medical School geneticists have found a molecular shortcut from light reception to gene activation in their work to understand biological clocks. Their research has revealed that the protein called White Collar-1 does double duty: it perceives light and then, in response to light, directly turns on a key gene called frequency, which is a central component of the clock.

Biological clocks are molecularly driven and are set, or synchronized, by the daily cycles of light and dark. Usin

After two years of stubborn persistence, scientists at Johns Hopkins have determined the 3-D structure of part of a protein called HER3, which should speed efforts to interfere with abnormal growth and cancer.

“It took us more than two years to interpret the data and get HER3’s structure,” says Dan Leahy, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor of biophysics in Hopkins’ Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. “Now that we have it, it might take only