Culture
Legume plants fix atmospheric nitrogen with the help of symbiotic bacteria, called Rhizobia, which colonize their roots. Therefore, plants have to be able to precisely recognize their symbiont to avoid infection by pathogenic microbes. To this end, legumes use different LysM receptor proteins located on the outer cell surface of their roots.
Geologists have developed a machine learning technique that highlights the potential for further deposits of the critical metal tungsten in SW England.
Tungsten is an essential component of high-performance steels but global production is strongly influenced by China and western countries are keen to develop alternative sources.
The health of wallabies and kangaroos is being affected by the herbicide, atrazine, which is used widely in Australia on cereal crops and in forestation to prevent weeds, according to new research.
Atrazine, which has been banned in the European Union since 2003, may be impacting reproduction in marsupials, the University of Melbourne study found, published today in Reproduction, Fertility and Development.
As the global count of COVID-19 infections heads towards the 20M mark, the pandemic has created what the World Health Organisation calls an 'infodemic', giving conspiracy groups a bigger platform than ever before.
Researchers from QUT's Digital Media Research Centre have taken a deep dive into their world to trace wild rumours on Facebook claiming the coronavirus was caused by 5G technology. They found what was once being preached to the already converted was quickly fanned further afield by social media and celebrities spreading the message.
In a new study in Cell Discovery, Chen-Yu Zhang's group at Nanjing University and two other groups from Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Second Hospital of Nanjing present a novel finding that absorbed miRNA MIR2911 in honeysuckle decoction (HD) can directly target SARS-CoV-2 genes and inhibit viral replication. Drinking of HD accelerate the negative conversion of COVID-19 patients.
An international team of researchers including the University of Adelaide, has found plant hormones known as strigolactones suppress the transportation of auxin, the main plant hormone involved in vein formation, so that vein formation occurs slower and with greater focus.
The research, published in Nature Communications, brings new knowledge about how hormones regulate plant growth, knowledge that will ultimately contribute to scientists' quest to improve crop productivity.
There's a reason why blue fruits are so rare: the pigment compounds that make fruits blue are relatively uncommon in nature. But the metallic blue fruits of Viburnum tinus, a popular landscaping plant in Europe, get their color a different way. Instead of relying solely on pigments, the fruits use structural color to reflect blue light, something that's rarely seen in plants.
Much smaller than its counterpart, the X chromosome, the Y chromosome has shrunken drastically over 200 million years of evolution. Even those who study it have used the word "wimpy" to describe it, and yet it continues to stick around even though sex chromosomes in non-mammalian vertebrates are known to experience quite a bit of evolutionarily turnover. An Opinion paper publishing on August 6 in the journal Trends in Genetics outlines a new theory--called the "persistent Y hypothesis"--to explain why the Y chromosome may be more resilient than it first appears.
Researchers have found that a common plant owes the dazzling blue colour of its fruit to fat in its cellular structure, the first time this type of colour production has been observed in nature.
The plant, Viburnum tinus, is an evergreen shrub widespread across the UK and the rest of Europe, which produces metallic blue fruits that are rich in fat. The combination of bright blue colour and high nutritional content make these fruits an irresistible treat for birds, likely increasing the spread of their seeds and contributing to the plant's success.
Inside every cell lies a genome - a full set of DNA that contains the instructions for building an organism. Across the biological world, genomes show a staggering diversity in size. For example, the genome of the Japanese white flower, Paris japonica, is over 150 billion base pairs, meaning that almost 100 meters of DNA is squeezed into each cell. In comparison, single-celled prokaryotes, like bacteria, have tiny genomes, averaging less than 5 million base pairs. Some prokaryotes have even smaller genomes that are fewer than 500,000 base pairs.
A fossil called Tanystropheus was first described in 1852, and it's been puzzling scientists ever since. At one point, paleontologists thought it was a flying pterosaur, like a pterodactyl, and that its long, hollow bones were phalanges in the finger that supported the wing. Later on, they figured out that those were elongated neck bones, and that it was a twenty-foot-long reptile with a ten-foot neck: three times as long as its torso.
A new analysis of sibling records from more than 300,000 individuals suggests that some parents continue to reproduce until they have children of both sexes.
The practice, which the two University of Michigan biologists who conducted the study dubbed "coupon-collection behavior" in human reproduction, appears to have increased in popularity in recent decades and reduces the amount of sex-ratio variation among families.
What The Study Did: SARS-CoV-2 molecular viral shedding in asymptomatic and symptomatic patients who were isolated in a community treatment center in South Korea is quantitatively described in this observational study.
Authors: Eunjung Lee, M.D., of the Soonchunhyang University Seoul Hospital in Seoul, South Korea, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.3862)
What The Study Did: This observational study looked at whether race and socioeconomic factors were associated with children enrolled in national clinical trials receiving high-cost proton radiotherapy for treatment of cancer.
Authors: Daphne A. Haas-Kogan, M.D., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2020.2259)
Non-white Americans, especially Asian Americans, are at disproportionately higher risk for gastric cancer compared to non-Hispanic white Americans. A new study breaks down this risk according to specific ethnicities and locations within the stomach.
The study published Aug. 6 in Gastroenterology analyzed California Cancer Registry data for the seven largest Asian American populations (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, South Asian and Southeast Asian) as well as for non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanic populations.