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Categories: Biology: Cell Biology, Paleontology: Climate

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Scales, spines, feathers and hair are examples of vertebrate skin appendages, which constitute a remarkably diverse group of micro-organs. Despite their natural multitude of forms, these appendages share early developmental processes at the embryonic stage. Researchers have discovered how to permanently transform the scales that normally cover the feet of chickens into feathers, by specifically modifying the expression of certain genes.

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Surprisingly, genome comparisons have failed to resolve a major question in animal evolution: Which living animals are the descendants of the earliest animals to evolve in the world's oceans? Scientists performed a detailed chromosomal analysis that comes down definitively in favor of comb jellies, or ctenophores, as the most recent common ancestor of all animals, or the sister taxa to all animals. Sponges evolved later.

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Pain is good. It's the body's way to keep an animal from harming itself or repeating a dangerous mistake. But sometimes the debilitating sensation can get in the way. So evolution has devised ways to tamp that response down under certain circumstances.

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A group of brain cells discovered by researchers reveals a potential new approach to anti-obesity treatment.

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Soon, you'll be able to get a box of freshly picked, sweet strawberries from the grocery store or local farm stand. But it's disappointing when you get them home and find that the ones at the bottom have started to rot. To increase the berries' shelf life, researchers have incorporated cannabidiol -- a non-hallucinogenic compound from cannabis known as CBD -- and sodium alginate into an edible antimicrobial coating.

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A new study adds to an emerging, radically new picture of how bacterial cells continually repair faulty sections of their DNA.

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Approximately 700,000 years ago, a 'warm ice age' permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth. During this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded. A research team identified this seemingly paradoxical connection. The shift in the Earth's climate represents a critical step in our planet's later climate development.

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The deadly hospital pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii can live for a year on a hospital wall without food and water. Then, when it infects a vulnerable patient, it resists antibiotics as well as the body's built-in infection-fighting response. The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes it as one of the three top pathogens in critical need of new antibiotic therapies. Now, an international team, led by Macquarie University researchers Dr. Ram Maharjan and Associate Professor Amy Cain, have discovered how the superbug can survive harsh environments and then rebound, causing deadly infections. They have found a single protein that acts as a master regulator. When the protein is damaged, the bug loses its superpowers allowing it to be controlled, in a lab setting. The research is published this month in Nucleic Acids Research.

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Individual fish in schools scatter in unison when a predator is in their midst. Such precisely coordinated group movements and immobility during threats have long been observed in insects and mammals. Now, a brain pathway has been discovered that enables individual animals to rapidly coordinate a unified response, with no rehearsal required.

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A research team, composed of climatologists and an astronomer, have used an improved computer model to reproduce the cycle of ice ages (glacial periods) 1.6 to 1.2 million years ago. The results show that the glacial cycle was driven primarily by astronomical forces in quite a different way than it works in the modern age. These results will help us to better understand the past, present, and future of ice sheets and the Earth's climate.

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Researchers have mapped out what a commonly-used form of phage looks like, which will help design better uses in future.

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Researchers have shown that extremophilic bacteria from high temperature marine environments can be used to reduce asbestos' toxicity.

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Scientists have precisely identified base pairs of the human genome that remained consistent over millions of years of mammalian evolution, and which play a crucial role in human disease. The team analyzed the genomes of 240 mammals, including humans and identified base pairs that were 'constrained' -- meaning they remained generally consistent -- across mammal species over the course of evolution. The most constrained base pairs in mammals were over seven times more likely to be causal for human disease and complex trait, and over 11 times more likely when researchers looked at the most constrained base pairs in primates alone.

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Researchers have examined a specific type of stem cell with an intracellular toolkit to determine which cells are most likely to create effective cell therapies.

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A new group of mitochondrial viruses confined to the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi Glomeromycotina may represent an ancestral lineage of mitoviruses.

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An international team has reconstructed the evolution of groundwater in the Great Basin, USA -- one of the driest regions on Earth -- up to 350,000 years into the past with unprecedented accuracy. The results shed new light on the effects of climate change on water supply and provide important insights for the sustainable use of groundwater resources.

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A new study finds that early human species adapted to mosaic landscapes and diverse food resources, which would have increased our ancestor's resilience to past shifts in climate.

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Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, researchers watched as their model organism, 'snowflake yeast,' began to adapt as multicellular individuals. In new research, the team shows how snowflake yeast evolved to be physically stronger and more than 20,000 times larger than their ancestor. Their study is the first major report on the ongoing Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE), which the team hopes to run for decades.

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Comparing individual cells across corn, sorghum, and millet reveals evolutionary differences among these important cereal crops, according to a new study. The findings bring researchers closer to pinpointing which genes control important agricultural traits such as drought tolerance, which will help scientists faced with a changing climate adapt crops to drier environments.

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Rhinoceros belong to a mammalian order called odd-toed ungulates that also include horses and tapirs. They are found in Africa and Asia. Until recently, evidence suggested that throughout their evolutionary history, gamma-retroviruses such as Murine leukemia virus had not colonized their genomes, unlike most other mammalian orders. The colonization process is called retroviral endogenization and has resulted in most mammalian genomes being comprised of up to ten percent retroviral like sequences.