News by Subject Biology

Plant root hairs increase the roots surface area enabling it to absorb more water and nutrients. Now, researchers have discovered how the hairs grow straight and long. To develop an elongated structure, cell expansion on the sides of the root hair must be suppressed as the tip elongates. If it wasn't for the suppression mechanism, the root would bulge out like a balloon and be unable to form the elongated tubular structure.

Biologists at the University of Cincinnati say the hungrier ticks are, the harder they try to find you or other hosts. The findings could have implications for the spread of tick-borne disease such as Lyme or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Scientists have discovered that tropical fish can control their gut microbes to better survive extremes of temperature, a study in eLife reveals.

A study led by Dr. Ravi Muddashetty at InStem, Bangalore identified distinct markers to distinguish ribosomes that are specialized for producing specific sets of proteins and hinted that this specialization could be important for the development of the nervous system.

A team headed by ICREA researchers Salvador Aznar Benitah and Fran Supek concludes that care should be taken with drugs that inhibit epigenetic factors. Published in Nature Cell Biology, the study is a collaboration between a biomedical lab and a computational lab at IRB Barcelona.

A team of scientists at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and McGill University have identified three genes responsible for recurrent molar pregnancies, a rare complication that occurs when a non-viable pregnancy with no embryo implants in the uterus. The results of this study, published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, could have important implications, since until now very little is known about the genetic causes of all forms of fetal loss.