News by Subject Biology

Researchers from the University of Freiburg are mapping the distribution of all proteins in mitochondria for the first time.

Every tissue has its own pattern of active alleles, a large-scale study led by an international team of scientists at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has found. Researchers of the former group of Denise Barlow were able to show that the differential allele activity is regulated by tissue-specific, regulatory DNA elements known as enhancers - a process that could also be involved in many diseases.

Genomic instability is the main risk factor for tumor development in humans. Therefore understanding its origin and and exploring therapeutic targets is paramount. Histone 1 silences a region of the genome that causes irreparable DNA damage when translated and is lethal for the organism.

To reign supreme in a colony, queen ants exude a special scent, or pheromone, on the waxy surface of their body that suppresses ovary development in their sisters, rendering the latter reproductively inactive workers that find food, nurse the young and protect the colony. Now, researchers at the University of California, Riverside have begun to unravel the molecular mechanisms behind how ants sense these pheromones and how they control reproduction regulation and other social activities in ant communities.

A new study suggests it may be possible to slow dangerous infections by manipulating the messages microbes send to one another, allowing the body to defeat an infection without causing the bacteria to develop resistance to the treatment.

EPFL scientists show how DNA is organized into specific regions, and that this depends on a combination of genomic distance and the presence of the CTCF protein.

The earliest introduction of domestic chickens and black rats from Asia to the east coast of Africa came via maritime trade routes between the 7th and 8th centuries AD. In a paper published today in the journal PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers, led by director Nicole Boivin of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, used new techniques to analyze ancient DNA and proteins from nearly 500 bone samples.