News by Subject Biology

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.

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.

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.