Beds of eelgrass (Zostera marina) form an important habitat in coastal regions throughout the northern hemisphere, crucial to many fish and other species and storing vast amounts of carbon. A new study published July 20 in Nature Plants shows that eelgrass spread around the world much more recently than previously thought, just under a quarter-million years ago. The results have implications for how eelgrass could be affected by a changing climate.
An artificial intelligence model has successfully identified coronaviruses capable of infecting humans, out of the thousands of viruses that circulate in wild animals. The model, developed by a team of biologists, mathematicians and physicists at the University of California, Davis, could be used in surveillance for new pandemic threats. The work was published June 8 in Scientific Reports.
In testing the genetic material of current populations in Africa and comparing against existing fossil evidence of early Homo sapiens populations there, researchers have uncovered a new model of human evolution — overturning previous beliefs that a single African population gave rise to all humans. The new research was published today, May 17, in the journal Nature.
Using a specially designed capsule, researchers can now voyage through the digestive system, collecting new data about digestion and microorganisms. The work by a team including researchers at the University of California, Davis, Stanford University and Envivo Bio Inc., is published May 10 in papers in Nature and Nature Metabolism.
Mammals are an extraordinarily diverse and successful group of animals, from the tiniest pygmy shrew to the mighty blue whale, and including, of course, ourselves. In a special issue of the journal Science published today (April 27), the Zoonomia Consortium shows how comparing the genomes of 240 modern mammals sheds light on mammalian evolution, with implications for conservation and understanding human and animal health.
A new study shows exactly how the gene BRCA2, linked to susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer, functions to repair damaged DNA. By studying BRCA2 at the level of single molecules, researchers at the University of California, Davis, have generated new insights into the mechanisms of DNA repair and the origins of cancer. The work was published the week of March 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Greek hero Heracles fought a monster called the Hydra, which grew two new heads for each one he lopped off. Heracles was lucky he wasn’t fighting something with the regenerative ability of the real Hydra, which can re-grow its entire body from a few hundred cells. This simple water animal is helping scientists explore how some animals can regrow missing body parts.
An internal circadian clock controls the distinctive concentric rings of flowering in sunflowers, maximizing visits from pollinators, a new study from plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, shows. The work was published Jan. 13 in eLife.
A sunflower head is made up of hundreds of tiny florets. Because of the way sunflowers grow, the youngest florets are in the center of the flower face and the most mature at the edges, forming a distinctive spiral pattern from the center to the edge.
An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95% efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was published Dec. 27 in Nature Communications.
Back-to-back papers in the Dec. 29 issue of Nature Plants report the first complete protein structures for plant respiratory supercomplex I+III₂. Obtaining these structures helps researchers understand basic plant biology, as well as stress responses and how biofuel crops might grow more rapidly.
