Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

At the end of January, more than 200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East-drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)-will be shipped to a remote island near the Arctic Circle, where they will be stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving their vitality for thousands of years……..

A study by the University of Exeter has highlighted the problems of reintroducing animals to the wild for conservation projects. Published online in the journal Biological Conservation, the research highlights the low survival rates of captive carnivores that are released into their natural habitats. On average only one in three captive-born carnivores survives in the wild, with most deaths correlation to human activities……..

Researchers have developed a potentially powerful new tool in the fight against deficiencies in dietary vitamin A, which cause eye diseases, including blindness, in 40 million children annually, and increased health risks for about 250 million people, mostly in developing countries. This tool consists of “a new method of analyzing the genetic makeup of corn that will enable developing countries to identify and increase cultivation of corn that has naturally high levels of vitamin A precursors,” says Ed Buckler, a co-leader of the research team from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service and Cornell University……..

The direct effect predators have on their prey is to kill them. The evolutionary changes that can result from this direct effect include prey that are younger at maturity and that produce more offspring. But killing prey also has indirect effects rarely characterized or measured such as a decline in the number of surviving prey, resulting, in turn, in more food available to survivors……..

Only plants can take nitrogen gas from the air and use it to make the protein they need to grow. Or so biologists thought. Now researchers at Ocean Genome Legacy in Ipswich, Mass., and their colleagues at Harvard Medical School have shown that animals, too, can convert air into food. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded their research……..

A green glow from a fruit fly is giving researchers the green light when they are on the right path in their quest to develop compounds that help prevent cancer. The glow, the result of some tinkering in Drosophila, the workhorse of the genetics world, lets researchers know when powerful cancer-prevention signals similar to those spurred by protective chemicals in broccoli, cabbage, and other foods, have been turned on in the organism……..

UBC scientists have discovered some of the genetic secrets that enable pine and spruce trees to fight off pests and disease, uncovering critical new information about forests natural defense systems. Assoc. Prof. Joerg Bohlmann says this genetic analysis will allow forest stewardship programs to reinforce a forests inherent strength, breeding trees that could in time repel insects such as British Columbias notorious mountain pine beetles……..

COX-2 inhibitors like Celecoxib have come under scrutiny lately due to adverse cardiovascular side-effects stemming from COX-2 reduction. In both fruit fly and rat models, researchers reveal another adverse effect of Celecoxib; this drug can induce arrhythmia. More interestingly, this effect is independent of the COX-2 enzyme……..

Astronomers from Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, have detected for the first time the molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide two ingredients that build life-forming amino acids in a galaxy some 250 million light years away. Just add water! said Robert Minchin, an Arecibo astronomer on the project, who explained that methanimine and hydrogen cyanide are two of the basic ingredients of life, because when combined with water they form glycine, the simplest amino acid, a building block of life on Earth……..

Outbreaks of the notorious crown of thorns starfish now threaten the coral triangle, the richest center of coral reef biodiversity on Earth, as per recent surveys by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. The starfish a predator that feeds on corals by spreading its stomach over them and using digestive enzymes to liquefy tissue were discovered in large numbers by the scientists in reefs in Halmahera, Indonesia, at the heart of the Coral Triangle, which lies between Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. It is considered the genetic fountainhead for coral diversity found on Australias Great Barrier Reef, Ningaloo and other reefs in the region……..