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Karnovsky, M. Kellems, R. Evidence for the association of cytoplasmic ribosomes with the outer mitochondrial membrane in situ. Evidence for ribosome binding sites on yeast mitochondria. Keyhani, E. Laulhere, J. Plant Sci. Margulies, M. Poyton, R. Shore, G. Download references. Gloria Chepko, Jessie S.
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Reprints and Permissions. After consuming cocaine, the DNA in their brain cells had different chemical modifications known as epigenetic changes.
These epigenetic changes also altered the types of RNAs the cells made through splicing. In this process, pieces of genes are left out or added in to create different RNAs that create different proteins. Scientists have known RNA splicing is particularly important for neurons, and the researchers behind this mouse study saw many epigenetic and splicing changes after the mice consumed cocaine.
Then, they artificially recreated one specific epigenetic change at a gene called Srsf This led Srsf11 to be spliced differently. However, Srsf11 is also a gene that controls splicing across the genome, meaning that changes to it had ripple effects in the mice. This one change also altered splicing across a few hundred other genes, some of which were previously implicated in substance use disorders. Most interestingly, the mice with the modified version of Srsf11 self-administered more cocaine, showing that these sorts of changes in the brain may underlie addiction.
Some researchers argue that increasing the body of evidence for the biological basis of substance use disorders reduces stigma against people who use substances, though the effectiveness of this in public messaging is debated.
Regardless, though we continue to see evidence that substance use disorders are biologically-driven, there are currently no approved drugs to treat the overuse of cocaine. Epigenetics and RNA splicing may be promising targets for future medical interventions. Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash. When we take medications, we generally do two things: first, we swallow some pills, then we wait for them to kick in. Whether or not they do, however, may be tied to our gut microbes.
Intestinal bacteria influence the availability and activity of therapeutic drugs in the body. In this study, researchers incubated 25 representative strains of gut bacteria with 12 orally administered drugs, including those used to treat asthma, high cholesterol, and diarrhea. By measuring drug levels in the growth medium before and after 48 hours of incubation, the scientists identified 29 novel bacteria-drug pairs in which the drug was depleted from the medium.
Comparing drug concentrations in the medium alone with that of the total culture revealed that, in most cases, the drug was absent from the medium but recoverable from the total culture.
These results suggest the medications were accumulating inside the bacteria. To explore this, the researchers incubated Caenorhabditis elegans , a nematode and model organism, with duloxetine, an antidepressant that was accumulated by several bacterial strains.
While duloxetine alone decreased nematode motility, adding a duloxetine-accumulating strain of E. These findings indicate that bacterial hoarding of medications may affect the way those drugs affect their targets. Ultimately, more research is required to determine whether a similar scenario plays out in the human gut, and in the context of other drugs.
Greater insight into the interplay between medications and gut microbes could expand our understanding of drug bioavailability and efficacy, and how they may vary from one person and gut microbiome to the next. Olson et al under CC BY 4. Fluorescence occurs across only a handful of mammals but they span three different continents and inhabit entirely different ecosystems.
The platypus is one such animal, whose glow-in-the-dark abilities were only discovered in But, a discovery earlier this year by Northland College researchers that springhares fluoresce is special: it is the first documented case of biofluorescence in an Afro-Eurasian placental mammal. The study purports that perhaps fluorescence in mammals is not as rare as once previously thought. Along the way, they accidentally discovered that springhares also glow.
One specimen they examined was collected in , and continued to glow in the dark for over years. The researchers subsequently tested live springhares this time, in the dead of night—springhares are nocturnal and found they could also fluoresce, predictably stronger than in the dead specimens.
This study raises the questions: What other animals are out there, pulsating in every different shade of the rainbow after the clock strikes midnight? Photo by Lomig on Unsplash. In a strange triumph of science, researchers have now successfully potty trained 11 cows.
The study, done by research groups in Germany and New Zealand, included 16 calves, which they trained by giving the calves a reward when they urinated in a latrine and later by adding an unpleasant stimulus three-second water spray when they began urinating outside of the designated area. The calves' potty training performances are equivalent to those of children and better than very young children.
First, because cattle waste is a substantial contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and soil and water contamination. Being able to collect cow waste in one place would enable us to treat and dispose of it properly.
One way of doing it is by keeping the animals confined in barns, but that lowers their welfare conditions. Second, it shows that cows are able to react to and control their reflexes, indicating that their behavior — like shown with many other animal species before — is subject to modification by using rewards. This demonstrates that cows have more awareness than previously thought, which is important to better understand their wellbeing and welfare needs.
Having cattle keep their own living areas a bit cleaner would also increase their welfare. Potty training cows in farm settings is time consuming and logistically challenging, but it would help significantly decrease gas emissions without compromising animal welfare.
Model calculations predict that capturing 80 percent of cattle waste could lead to a 56 percent reduction in ammonia emissions, which would lead to cleaner air for all of us. Photo by David Clode on Unsplash. Our cells require proteins, which are composed of individual amino acids connected in a long chain, to perform important functions. These amino acids are delivered to protein-building machinery by another molecule called a tRNA.
Mutations in ARS enzymes cause diseases such as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which affects the nerves to a person's arms and legs, because cells cannot make proteins properly. Currently, there are few treatments for ARS defects. However, researchers predict that flooding cells with extra amino acid might allow defective ARS enzymes to function better.
To test this, scientists identified patients with ARS mutations that cause charging defects, and grew their cells in a petri dish. They then treated these cells with different amounts of amino acid, and compared the electrical impedance of the cells that received treatment to those that did not.
As cells grow, they block the electrical current, and the speed at which the current is blocked corresponds to how fast the cells are growing. The scientists found cells with ARS mutations that were treated with amino acids grew faster than cells that did not receive treatment.
These promising results meant that the researchers could move on to trying this treatment in the patients themselves. They designed specific amino acid treatments for four people with the same ARS mutations they studied in cells, monitored their symptoms over time, and found that giving patients amino acids alleviated many of their most severe symptoms. Considering that ARS mutations can cause very severe disease, this is exciting and promising for both scientists and patients alike.
A rapidly changing climate is expected to shift where species live. This will also alter human activities like agriculture and forest conservation , as the ranges of plant pathogens change.
In an article published in Nature Communications , a group of researchers led by Joan Dudney demonstrate exactly this in a natural system. Blister rust is a fungal disease that threatens white pine forests across Europe and North America. Leveraging blister rust prevalence data from two surveys conducted twenty years apart and in SEKI, alongside climate data over the same timeframe, they authors found that a warming, increasingly dry climate caused contraction of blister rust's range at low elevations and expansion at higher elevations, where conditions remained relatively mild.
They noted an approximately 33 percent decline in overall disease prevalence despite these expansions and high elevations.
The blister rust fungus has a complex lifecycle that requires both a white pine tree and an alternative host, such as Ribes shrubs. Dudney and her fellow researchers found that alternative hosts were less common at higher elevations, likely limiting blister rust's ability to infect pine trees at those elevations even though the pathogen could live there. They also observed that aridity, or dryness, played an important role in determining infection risk.
The study provides a roadmap for future studies on host-pathogen-climate interactions. Genomic adaptations of rapidly reproducing pathogens to changing conditions could further alter these dynamics and represent an additional avenue to explore in future work.
To some animals, their own excretion isn't just waste. They may use their fecal matter to ward off predators. Here are several examples of fecal prowess. Sperm whales are some of the largest animals to ever exist, reaching a whopping 14 meters long in adulthood. Despite their intimidating size, they still can get spooked such as by pesky divers and unleash a poopy trick.
Through emergency defecation, a sperm whale can disperse a smoke screen of shit into the water before the cetacean makes its escape. Waving its tail to disperse their poop creates an underwater "poopnado," as Canadian diver Keri Wilk called it. These enormous diarrhea clouds also help recycle nutrients and store immense amounts of carbon, mitigating some effects of climate change. The larvae of the tortoise beetle are the Captain America of the animal kingdom — because they make shields out of poop.
Using their maneuverable anus that sits on their flexible rear end, they deposit their dung defense on their back. The fecal armor, made in part from the larvae's shed exoskeleton, can double as a club to whack off potential predators. Some beetle species can swing their poop shields around to hit predators with them. And some of the poop is shed exoskeleton, in order to retain any toxins that the beetle may have.
The Green Woodhoopoe takes a rather straightforward approach to defense. Young birds will simply coat themselves in liquid poop, using the odor to deter — or gross out — would-be predators.
You wouldn't want to eat a poop-slathered bird now, would you? From our perspective on Earth, most stars look like tiny, twinkling dots. But what color would a star be if you could actually see it up close?
Most astronomy textbooks will clearly say hot stars are blue, and colder stars are red. These colors come from an idealized version of the light a star gives off, called a blackbody curve. New research published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society calculated colors of stars based on their actual energy distributions and the response of the human eye.
Smaller stars, like K and M stars , are beige instead of red. These cool sub-stars are purple because absorption by molecules in their atmospheres takes out a whole chunk of their visible light, leaving only red and blue light for us to see. There are a few more complexities that could change the color a star appears to us. Oxytocin earns its loving nickname because the brain releases the hormone during moments of social bonding, such as those between a parent and child or romantic partners.
But beyond this role, oxytocin has long been thought to play a more direct role in social circuit development, and a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience put this idea to the test with zebrafish. Zebrafish are social creatures with evolutionarily similar brain circuitry to humans. Scientists can genetically alter them before observing their behavior across an entire lifespan, making them ideal for studying social behavior.
So to understand the role of oxytocin-producing neurons in social brain development, researchers selectively removed those neurons from their brain circuits early in life and examined the consequences to social behavior once the zebrafish reached adulthood. The researchers evaluated the zebrafish behavior by first separating a fish from a larger group with a transparent barrier, then observing how the lone fish reacts to its isolation.
Like a person with FOMO "fear of missing out" from a party next door, socially healthy zebrafish stay close to the transparent barrier — seemingly longing to join the group on the other side. However, zebrafish with a disrupted social circuit explore their own tank with no preference to socialize. Researchers found that zebrafish with their oxytocin neurons removed early in life showed less preference to socialize as adults.
However, eliminating these cells in adulthood did not affect social behavior, suggesting that oxytocin shapes the social circuit early in life during a critical developmental window. They also found that removing oxytocin neurons early impaired other social brain components, including those required for attention, decision making, and reward. Together, this suggests that the famous "love hormone" may define our long-term social preferences early in life.
But unlike a Pixar movie, fish are not humans, and there is still more to learn about social brain development. Tool making is a complex behavior that, until recently, had only been confirmed in three species of primates including humans , and in some birds, including captive Goffin's cockatoos.
Now, a research group at the University of Vienna that has studied Goffin's cockatoos for decades has also observed the behavior in wild cockatoos. This species of cockatoo, a member of the parrot family, is comparable to three-year-old humans in terms of intelligence.
But before now, tool making behavior has not been observed in wild cockatoos, which is necessary to confirm that a species is indeed capable of making tools and their tool use is not just an artifact of captivity. The group spent over hours observing wild birds in their natural habitat in the Tanimbar Islands, Indonesia, with no success in witnessing tool use and manufacture.
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