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Categories: Biology: Cell Biology, Ecology: Animals

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Your liver plays a vital role in your metabolism, the biological process which converts food into energy. We know that being overweight can negatively affect metabolic activity, but not exactly how. To better understand this, researchers compared the livers of mice which were a typical weight with mice which were obese. They were surprised to find that biological regulation of metabolic activity, after a period of feasting and fasting, was reversed between them. In typical mice, allosteric regulation (the process which controls metabolism) was inhibited during feeding and activated when fasting. However, in obese mice, allosteric regulation increased during feeding and decreased when fasting.

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Striped marlin are some of the fastest animals on the planet and one of the ocean's top predators. When hunting in groups, individual marlin will take turns attacking schools of prey fish one at a time. Now a new study helps to explain how they might coordinate this turn-taking style of attack on their prey to avoid injuring each other. The key, according to the new work, is rapid color changes.

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Sight loss in certain inherited eye diseases may be caused by gut bacteria, and is potentially treatable by antimicrobials, finds a new study in mice.

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Resizing of the intestine is a highly conserved strategy employed by a wide range of organisms to cope with fluctuation in nutrient availability. Nevertheless, very little is known about the mechanisms and signals underlying nutrient-mediated gut resizing. New research has identified one of the signaling pathways implicated in this process.

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An often-overlooked water plant that can double its biomass in two days, capture nitrogen from the air -- making it a valuable green fertilizer -- and be fed to poultry and livestock could serve as life-saving food for humans in the event of a catastrophe or disaster, a new study suggests.

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Iron is a micronutrient for plants. Biologists now show that regulatory proteins for iron uptake behave particularly dynamically in the cell nucleus when the cells are exposed to blue light -- an important signal for plant growth. They found that the initially homogeneously distributed proteins relocated together into 'biomolecular condensates' in the cell nucleus shortly after this exposure.

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A collaborative research team develops an absorbent multifunctional nanofiber adhesive hemostat based on a protein biomaterial.

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Researchers reveal how cells regenerate protein factories at endoplasmic reticulum.

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A new technique for electro-spinning sponges has allowed scientists to directly produce 3D scaffolds -- on which skin grafts could be grown from the patient's own skin.

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Bats live in a world of sounds. They use vocalizations both to communicate with their conspecifics and for navigation. For the latter, they emit sounds in the ultrasonic range, which echo and enable them to create an 'image' of their surroundings. Neuroscientists have now discovered how Seba's short-tailed bat, a species native to South America, manages to filter out important signals from ambient sound and especially to distinguish between echolocation and communication calls.

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The evolutionary success of the first large predators on land was driven by their need to improve as killers, researchers suggest.

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Scientists have discovered that bacteria can pair up their defense systems to create a formidable force, greater than the sum of its parts, to fight off attack from phage viruses. Understanding how bacteria react to this type of virus is a big step in combating antimicrobial resistance.

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A chemical compound essential to all living things has been synthesized in a lab in conditions that could have occurred on early Earth, suggesting it played a role at the outset of life.

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Mice that received fecal implants from donors that had their ovaries removed gained more fat mass and had greater expression of liver genes associated with inflammation, Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and atherosclerosis. The findings may shed light on the greater incidence of metabolic dysfunction in postmenopausal women.

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Researchers have discovered that damage to the cell membrane promotes cellular senescence, or cell aging.

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Australia can lay claim to two new species of native rodent thanks to a new study. The aptly named delicate mouse was previously thought to be a single species spanning a massive stretch of the country from the Pilbara in Western Australia, across parts of the Northern Territory and through Queensland down to the New South Wales border. We now know there are three distinct species.

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Researchers have paired a deep learning model with experimental data to 'decode' mouse neural activity. Using the method, they can accurately determine where a mouse is located within an open environment and which direction it is facing, just by looking at its neural firing patterns. Being able to decode neural activity could provide insight into the function and behavior of individual neurons or even entire brain regions.

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The effects of a phenomenon called tree masting on ecosystems and food webs can be better understood thanks to new theoretical models validated by real world observations.

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About a decade ago, researchers began to observe a recurring challenge in their research: Some of the compounds they were developing to harness energy from bacteria were instead killing the microbes. Not good if the objective of the project was to harness the metabolism of living bacteria to produce electricity.

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Scientists discovered antibodies that protect against a host of lethal snake venoms.