International collaboration of scientists rewrite the rulebook of flowering plant genetics
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Scientists around the world are collaborating on a project that is changing the way they trace the evolutionary history of flowering plants. By using new technology allowing them to rapidly retrieve and compare DNA sequences from among any of the 300,000 species of flowering plants, scientists are unraveling the 140-million-year history of the largest group of land plants on Earth and providing a framework to protect vulnerable species and populations into the future.
The National Science Foundation recently provided funding to over 100 herbaria across the Southeast U.S. to digitize more than three million plant specimens collected by botanists and naturalists across the country. Researchers tracked the speed and productivity of staff and students who handled the specimens, from the collection drawers to online repositories, to provide institutions with a framework to better determine the time and money needed to digitize remaining collections.
After examining nearly the entire human genome for genetic changes that increase risk of aneurysm, researchers discovered a new change in the genetic code of a transcription factor.
DeepMind is partnering with EMBL to make the most complete and accurate database yet of the predicted human protein structures freely and openly available to the scientific community The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database will enable research that advances understanding of these building blocks of life, accelerating research across a variety of fields. AlphaFold's impact is already being realised by early partners researching neglected diseases, studying antibiotic resistance, and recycling single-use plastics.
In a new study, researchers have uncovered how cytolysins from Enterococcus faecalis destroys bacterial and mammalian cells.
For more than a century, researchers have relied on flat sketches of sharks' digestive systems to discern how they function -- and how what they eat and excrete impacts other species in the ocean. Now, researchers have produced a series of high-resolution, 3D scans of intestines from nearly three dozen shark species that will advance the understanding of how sharks eat and digest their food.
The Xerces blue butterfly is generally accepted as the first American insect species destroyed by urban development, but there are lingering questions about whether it was really a species to begin with, or just a sub-population of another common butterfly. In a new study, researchers analyzed the DNA of a 93-year-old Xerces blue specimen in museum collections, and confirmed that it was a unique species.
Scientists reveal a key role for interspecific gene flow in the continent-wide adaptive radiation of the Heliconius butterflies.
Researchers at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University have created an attention-based model, MultiRM, that supports 12 RNA modifications for large-scale prediction and interpretation. The research aims to offer an interpretable predictor that could achieve state-of-the-art accuracy when identifying these RNA modifications and primary RNA sequences.
Contrary to popular belief, early bacterial evolution is not driven by random-point mutations.