90 results found for biology

When Monsanto first tried to introduce GMO seeds into Europe there was a backlash by the Green parties and their political allies, who feared that American agro-business was about to take over their food supply. Thus began a massive campaign not agai....

Our capacity for complex speech and language remains one of the most intriguing aspects of being human. It has long been suspected that some answers to this enigma will be found buried within the genome. With recent advances in genetic technologies, ....

In 1952, Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the description of the phenomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Over the years, NMR has been used in a wide range of fundamental studies in physics, and in the....

Thirty years ago it was thought that the endothelium, a layer of thin, flat cells that line the interior surface of blood vessels was inert. However, major discoveries since then have demonstrated that it is a highly metabolic organ involved in maint....

There have been many arguments for and against GM Foods, but the question still stands - are they potential saviors of mankind or a disaster waiting to happen? This award winning video covers a range of important issues, discussed by scientists with ....

Despite their relatively small mass, 10-5% of the earth biosphere as a whole, generations of ambitious 'homo sapiens' have already played a major and increasing role in changing basic properties of the atmosphere and the earth's surface. Human activ....

Winner of the Nobel Prize 1991 in Physiology / Medicine 1991 together with Erwin Neher 'for their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells'

Dr Lander and his colleagues have developed many of the key tools and generated many of the key information resources for modern mammalian genomics. Their work includes mapping and sequencing of the human, mouse, and other genomes. He was elected a m....

A brief summary from the literature about cancer cells' metabolism; 1) the major pathways cancer cells use to generate energy and macromolecules efficiently and rapidly and 2) the enzymes cancer cells up-regulate to control those pathways.

After reconsidering the very long time periods in cosmic evolution, we will focus our attention to the evolutionary development of living organisms on our planet Earth. The genetic variants (mutations), which are occasionally produced, are alteratio....

The human brain is made up of close to a trillion nerve cells (or neurons), each of which makes connections with, on average, hundreds of other nerve cells, to form the complex neuronal circuits that control all brain activities, including perception....

BRAC2 is a tumor suppressor gene. Its protein product interacts with other proteins to assist regulation of DNA repair, transcription and cell cycle checkpoints. BRAC2 gene disruption may lead to protein truncation, mutations and loss of function. Ce....

Using microorganisms to clear pollution.

Winner of he Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1995 together with Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus 'for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development'.

The human body may seem to be no more than a bundle of tissues and organs, yet the cells these are made from are capable of interacting, communicating and performing complex tasks. Our cells' capacity to interact in this way enables humans to adapt t....

Everything we know about the world comes to us through our brain. Yet for each of us our own conscious mental world of thoughts and feelings is isolated and private. Despite centuries of research, language or gesture remains the only way we can disco....

Saino describes her success in developing electrochemical biosensors during her PhD course at Toyo University.

It has long been the goal of molecular biologists to design DNA binding proteins for the specific control of gene expression. The zinc finger design, discovered by Sir Aaron Klug 20 years ago, is ideally suited for such purposes, discriminating betwe....

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine / Physiology 1991 together with Bert Sakmann 'for their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells'.

Beginning with an exception to normal function caused by a genetic aberration, one may hope to find at least one protein with non-redundant function in a certain biological process. This approach permitted the identification of the receptor for bacte....

Dr Sarah Teichmann is based at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge.  In the post-genomic era, high-throughput methods are providing us with a deluge of data about genes and proteins. What knowledge about biology do....

Professor Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.  To facilitate instant recovery of active life once bears wake up from their winter sleep, nature provides ingenious mechanism based on periodic packing of their ribosomes, the cellular ma....

The normal proteins which circulate in human blood are either known or presumed to have beneficial functions. However normal immunity and inflammation proteins can cause or exacerbate disease in addition to helping to resist infections.

The diagnosis, classification, and treatment of human cancers are being transformed by scientific discoveries that were strongly influenced by the discovery of the c-src proto-oncogene, as described in the lecture by Michael Bishop. The path to this ....

The lecture will be devoted to the topic of how the biological world supplies itself with energy to make biology work, and what medical consequences ensue when the energy supply chain in our bodies is damaged or defective. We derive our energy from ....

A surprising finding over the past 20 years is that all animals have many of the same genes and that they use them in similar ways to grow and develop. These similarities mean that much of what is learned about what genes do in simple animals such as....

Genetic Programming is an artifical intelligence technique based off of natural selection. A generation of programs is generated, then tested using a fitness function. After that successful programs are altered and replicated successively until a d....

A brief overview of genetically modified organisms and their effect on the global population.

The human genome sequence has been available for more than a decade, but its significance is still not fully understood. While most human genes have been identified, there is much to learn about the DNA signals that control them. This lecture describ....

Since its introduction as a biological marker, the Aequorea victoria Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) has had a strong impact in biology, being used in an ever-increasing variety of ways. I will review a bit of the history of GFP and show how having ....

Günter Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine/ Physiology 1999 'for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell'. In this interview Blobel talks about the work that he did for t....

Functional nature of mycorrhizal-like symbiosis in a liverwort

Despite the enormous advances in structural studies of biological systems we are frequently left without a clear structure function correlation and cannot fully describe how different systems actually work. This introduces a major challenge for compu....

The aim of this presentation is to provide an overview of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and the associated carcinogenic pathologies of HPV. The predominant cellular players discussed in HPV pathologies are p53 and viral oncoprotein E6. In addition,....

Both evolutionary biology and genetics have their roots 150 years ago in work with phenotypic variants of plants and animals. In contrast, microbial genetics originating as recently as the 1940s, rapidly revealed that filamentous DNA molecules are th....

During the defence of his doctoral thesis, Mohamed describes his work and investigation of curcin, the ribosome-inactivating protein and the ways it may be used in the treatment of cancer.

The concept of bioelectricity emerged in the late 18th century, based on the experiments of Galvani and Volta. Sixty years ago, Hodgkin and Huxley showed that the nerve impulse is a result of permeability changes of the nerve membrane. This raised th....

An archive interview with the winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine

Discussion on the background information, etiology, and treatment of HER2 positive breast cancer.

Like his nineteenth century contemporaries David Ferrier tried to reveal cerebral localisation of function by direct electrical stimulation of the exposed brain of animals. With some notable exceptions the results were disappointing and confined to t....

Sheila MacNeil outlines an interesting technique.

Historically memory research has focussed on the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain's temporal lobes. Damage to the hippocampus is known to have a devastating impact on the ability to form new memories as well as compromising recollection of ....

Viruses are a major cause of death and disease. Too small to be seen by light microscopy, they were first visualised about 50 years ago by electron microscopy. Dr. Crowther describes his work on the development of the methods and illustrates how he h....

In 2010, we chemically synthesized the 1078 Kb Mycoplasma mycoides genome and transplanted it into a recipient cell cytoplasm to create a 'synthetic cell', JCVI-syn1.0 (Science, 329, 52-56, 2010). We identified several hundred non-essential genes by ....

Proteins are the action molecules of all cells, and to function properly, protein chains must fold and assemble correctly. But each chain of every protein runs the risk that it will combine with one or more identical chains to form nonfunctional aggr....