EMBL
Ancient Tweaking
Twenty years ago, scientists knew nothing of the scraps of RNA that are now known to influence just about every process in our bodies. Back then, the textbooks were simpler: genes code for proteins via the intermediate of RNA, and proteins called transcription factors regulate other proteins. This recipe was so entrenched in the basic [...]
Shaping up HIV
In the 1960s, a Danish company, seeking to improve on the traditional football made from the bladder and stomach of animals, invented the modern football. The designers realised that to form a perfect ball they needed to combine 20 leather hexagons with 12 pentagons, and in so doing demonstrated one of the basic laws of [...]
Cue factors
Our genes were once thought to be responsible for shaping who we are. But now scientists are having a rethink. Thanks to a glut of data from new sequencing projects, researchers are beginning to recognise that the regions of the human genome that encode proteins are unlikely to be behind the millions of differences between [...]
Surviving drought
We’ve all felt it: a quickening of the heart and a slight shortness of breath as you walk into an exam room. Most of us recognise that the hormone adrenaline is responsible for this reaction, but we’re not unique in responding to stress with a release of hormones.
Plants do this too – but unlike you [...]
Pinning the tail on the histone
Nearly 60 years ago, Pamela Lewis, a geneticist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, noticed that some of the flies she was experimenting on had tiny comb-like structures on their second and third pairs of legs, and not
just the first pair as is usual.
Lewis called these structures ‘sex-combs‘ because males use them [...]
Waxing cutaneous
When we’re in the bath, our skin prevents both water from moving into our bodies and essential nutrients from leaching into the tub. But because most of us don’t spend our entire lives submerged underwater, our skin’s chief role is to control how much water evaporates from our bodies. In fact, the skin’s role as [...]
Decloaking the germ
The bacterium Listeria infects humans through contaminated food. Once in the gut, this pathogen can be life-threatening if contracted during pregnancy or by newborns and those with weakened immune systems.
But for most people, an encounter with Listeria causes nothing more than vomiting and diarrhoea because our immune system recognises the
long, propeller-like projections on the bacterial [...]
A nervous switch
In 1863 a Heidelberg doctor described a devastating neurodegenerative condition that causes children to forget how to walk and talk before their teens.
The symptoms begin with muscle weakness, poor balance and a slurring of speech, and develop into a gradual breakdown in all motor control.
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