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Lab Notes

Short stories and links shared by the scientists in our community

Woolly mammoths may have roamed Canada 1,000 years longer than previously thought

A new method to extract DNA from sediment provides insight into the history of mammoths and horses

Farah Qaiser

Molecular Genetics

University of Toronto

After 57 years, the Arecibo Observatory’s iconic telescope is shutting down

The US National Science Foundation is planning to dismantle the damaged telescope

Gabriela Serrato Marks

Science Journalism

Massive Science

Curious honey bees are more likely to have curious kids

Foraging honey bees search for new food sources as flowering plants emerge

Lila Westreich

Pollinator Ecology

University of Washington

Could the next coronavirus outbreak come from pigs?

A virus called SADS-CoV could also spillover to humans

Ashley Knox

Microbiology and Virology

University of Colorado

Protecting 8% of the ocean from fishing could generate an extra $15 billion worth of seafood annually

Marine Protected Areas will drastically increase production from fisheries in a more sustainable way

Ashley Marranzino

Marine Biology

University of Rhode Island

Microscopic worms pee milk on their children as their bodies decompose

C. elegans turn their aging bodies into food for their children

Brittney G. Borowiec

Comparative Physiology

Wilfrid Laurier University

Tardigrades glow bright to survive blasts of UV radiation

A fluorescent coat protects some species of tardigrade from lethal doses of UV radiation

Sree Rama Chaitanya

Molecular Biology

Scientists are trying to develop sustainable biomaterials from wood

Hemicelluloses are already used in food packaging, hydrogels, and more

Lauren Sara McKee

Microbiology, Biochemistry, and Biotechnology

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Disruption of “molecular glue” within our brain cells can lead to Alzheimer’s 

Sticky proteins help the endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria inside brain cells communicate with each other

Adithi Ramakrishnan

Developmental Neuroscience

College of William and Mary

Inside our brain cells, two proteins act like molecular glue to stick two cell components — the power-packed mitochondria and the tubular endoplasmic reticulum — to each other.  With the aid of these sticky proteins, the mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum can talk with one another, helping our brain cells produce energy, get rid of damaged parts, and respond to threats from the environment.  Getting rid of the protein glue that sticks these two cell components together can prevent essential cell functions from running smoothly. 

Since many of the cell functions managed by this molecular glue are also disrupted in Alzheimer’s Disease, a recent study investigated whether the brains of deceased Alzheimer’s patients were missing their sticky proteins.  The researchers searched for two glue proteins (VAPB and PTPPIP51) in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s who had died and attached a glowing “tag” to any proteins they observed, so that they could see how many there were.  

They found that brains in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease had less “sticky” connections between the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum, meaning that the two were less able to communicate. They also found different amounts of the glue proteins in early and late stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. 

The results indicated that there could be some relationship between damage to these glue proteins and the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.  We still don’t know how exactly Alzheimer’s messes with sticky proteins, but this study clues us into how important good communication is to keeping a brain cell healthy.

A new antibiotic punctures bacterial cells and destroys a B-vitamin

The one-two punch may prevent the development of resistance to this antibiotic

We need new antibiotics that are immune to resistance. For every new antibiotic that humans have produced (most of which are merely derived from the natural molecules made by bacteria), bacteria have developed resistance mechanisms that are rapidly spread by horizontal gene transfer (HGT). HGT is the set of processes that allow bacteria to share genes, especially the genes that make them resistant to antibiotics.

Princeton University researchers have recently found a new antibiotic compound, which they named Irresistin, because it does not induce antibiotic resistance. They published their findings in the journal Cell. Irresistin works by puncturing bacterial walls and destroying folate (vitamin B9, which bacteria need to produce their DNA) within the bacterial cells. 

The scientists assert that Irresistin’s dual mechanism of action may account for its immunity to resistance. Their experiments demonstrate that Irresistin works against many bacteria, including the notorious superbug MRSA. But given the history of pathogens developing antibiotic resistance to every known antibiotic, plus the natural tendency of bacteria to spread resistance genes via HGT, how likely is it that Irresistin will thwart Nature’s ability to evolve resistance once it is introduced in the clinic? That question remains to be answered.

If Irresistin can sustain immunity to antibiotic resistance — and proving that might take years of clinical use — the dual mechanism strategy employed by the Princeton scientists might point the way for the future development of resistant-immune antibiotic drugs.

Octopus-inspired robot can climb ladders and walls

New research highlights how mimicking nature makes for great design

Shannon Casey

Biology and Medicine

Investigating components of the natural world can lead to solutions for everyday problems. This process of emulating nature in order to find innovative solutions for complex design challenges is called biomimicry.

Biomimicry is a very useful concept in robotics. For example, the octopus is a highly intelligent creature that uses its body in unique ways. This model has inspired researchers to develop a soft-body robot made of silicone capable of climbing.

The robot, reported at the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Systems in August, was constructed with two flexible arms. Each arm was made of silicone and had a grasping part and a lifting part. The grasping part resembled the spiral curve of an octopus tentacle. The lifting part contained a string that, when pulled, enabled the robot to climb. The researchers placed the robot on a ladder and a bumpy wall to demonstrate that it could grasp bars and complete vertical climbing tasks. They also found that the robot was able to grasp a variety of objects with its flexible silicone arms.  

And this group from Hosei University in Tokyo isn’t the only one drawing on the octopus for robot inspiration. Other researchers have considered the cephalopod when designing machines for years, including a “Tentacle Bot” reported earlier this year.

As a next step, the researchers want to further develop the robot’s artificial intelligence. This is a noteworthy example of how biomimicry can help inform the future of science and technology.

New squirrel species appeared faster when squirrels came down from the trees

New research identifies important factors in the evolutionary history of squirrels

Hector Tejero

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Institute of Evolutionary Biology, Barcelona

There are almost 300 species of squirrels in the world. From terrestrial marmots in North America to gliding squirrels in Southeast Asia, these animals show an outstanding diversity of locomotion modes and ecological specializations. 

In a recent paper in Mammal Review, paleoecologists investigated the factors that have played a role in accelerating the origination (speciation) and disappearance (extinction) of squirrel species. They reconstructed the ecological and evolutionary history of squirrels in order to identify ancestral characteristics  — traits that were present in past squirrel species  — and periods when the distributions of squirrels changed. This allowed them to identify factors associated with squirrel diversification. 

The researchers found that the first squirrels lived exclusively in trees around 40 million years ago. They concluded that the subsequent adaptation to moving on the ground probably boosted speciation in squirrels. Their results show that squirrels in mountains had higher diversification rates than their lowland relatives, reflecting that mountain ranges offer more ecological resources due to a wide variety of habitats. Most importantly, the researchers found that species present in many different habitats are less affected by changes than species in only one kind of habitat, which are prone to go extinct when conditions change. 

Based on their results and the evidence of the impact of past environmental change on biodiversity, the researchers warn that the current anthropogenic climate change, triggered by global warming and deforestation, will provoke the extinction of an important part of squirrel diversity. Moreover, surviving species will suffer a drastic reduction in their distribution, increasing the probability of their extinction, too.

Plants can grow quickly or accurately, but not both

New research examines this well-known trade-off in our floral friends

Kelly Cotton

Cognitive Psychology

City University of New York

Generally, our actions are subject to a speed-accuracy trade-off: the faster you do something, the less accurate you tend to be. Slower behaviors allow you to gather more information about your goal and you can adjust your actions accordingly, whether moving your hand to precisely grasp a target or deciding when to press a button. Humans and many animals consistently demonstrate the speed-accuracy trade-off. Do plants?

In a recent study, researchers measured the growth of snow pea plants as they climbed towards a support trellis. Surprisingly, as the plants grew upwards, they grew faster as they reached to grasp the thin support compared to how quickly they grew toward a thick support. This finding is perfectly in line with a speed-accuracy trade-off explanation. Thicker supports may actually be more difficult to grasp and less preferred by climbing plants, so much that in rainforest field studies, fewer climbing plants are found in areas with thicker supports.

How are plants, with no advanced nervous system, able to gather information about their environment to guide their behavior, planning and flexibly executing movement? Sound, maybe. Or chemoreception. Possibly even eye-like structures. These findings about the speed-accuracy trade-off in plants perpetuate this interesting debate about plant communication.

¿Puedes saber la edad de un chimpancé por sus canas?

A diferencia de lo que ocurre en humanos, las canas no son una buena pista para saber la edad de los chimpancés

Laura Martinez-Inigo

Animal Behavior and Primatology

Scientists develop a “liquid biopsy” that can detect many types of cancer through a simple blood test

The test even saved the lives of several study participants who had no symptoms

Ivana Marisa da Costa Martins

Molecular Biology and Oncology

University of Coimbra

How does Pfizer’s “90% effective” COVID-19 vaccine work?

Pfizer made a big news splash, but is their mRNA vaccine a silver bullet?

Brittney G. Borowiec

Comparative Physiology

Wilfrid Laurier University

Researchers discover a highland population of New Guinea singing dogs

These rare animals are known for their harmonic, whale-like howls

Farah Qaiser

Molecular Genetics

University of Toronto

Island- and mainland-dwelling gibbons have differently shaped jaws

These findings could help scientists classify fossil primates

Brittany Kenyon-Flatt

Biological Anthropology

North Carolina State University

One challenge in evolutionary biology is that fossils rarely contain DNA, and so it can be tricky to classify fossil animals without the ability to travel back in time and see them in the wild. Scientists have begun exploring how other methods, like quantifying skeletal morphology, are useful for taxonomic assessment. They test these methods by looking at morphologic differences between closely related living species. 

New research by a team of anthropologists investigated whether there were differences in the mandibular shape of gibbons. They studied three subspecies of white-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) one species of black-handed gibbon (Hylobates agilis) from Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar. They tested whether mandible (jaw) shape was influenced by allometry (or, the relationship of body size to shape) and geography.  

Using novel geometric morphometric methods, the researchers found that there were differences in mandibular shape between the two species, and that the white-handed gibbons had a more variable mandible than the black-handed gibbon. This was not due to allometry, or body size differences, but could be attributed to where they live. The gibbons from Indonesian islands had a different mandibular shape than the gibbons from mainland Thailand and Myanmar. The researchers hypothesized that these differences are related to behavioral differences such as different diet compositions. For example, island species might eat more fruits than mainland species.  

Results from this study suggest that we can learn about taxonomic differences in closely related species from studying their morphology. This is an important clue for better understanding primate evolution, as it highlights how testing specific groups, like gibbons, will help us to better understand primate taxonomy and evolution.  

Ocean heatwaves leave fish susceptible to bacterial infection

Climate change is killing hundreds of coral reef fish... all at once

Ashley Marranzino

Marine Biology

University of Rhode Island

Fish in Charleston, SC are eating microplastic fibers

Our oceans and coastal ecosystems are filled with tiny plastics, which is bad news for aquatic life

Jack Hawley

Oceanography

Humboldt State University

Frogs and toads invest in body fat storage systems to survive times of low food availability

New research explores the expensive tissue hypothesis in anurans

Mallory Wiper

Evolutionary Biology and Animal Behavior

Max G. Levy

Science and Health Journalism and Chemical Engineering

Fruit flies behave more bravely in groups than on their own

Researchers identify how fruit flies communicate safety to each other

Rita Ponce

Evolutionary Biology

Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal

Animals living in groups take cues from each other. Freezing or immobilization is a common individual response to danger in many species — seen in vertebrates and invertebrates. Moreover, it can also signal a threat to surrounding animals, a signal that can even be perceived by different species, and it does not attract unwanted attention.   

Now, a pair of neurobiologists have studied the freezing behavior of fruit flies, which is how they respond to imminent danger. Previous work led by one of the researchers, Marta Moita, had found that individual fruit flies either flee or freeze when they face a situation of unescapable danger. This unescapable danger created in the lab was placing the flies in an enclosed transparent chamber and exposing them to an expanding dark disk, intending to mimic an object on a collision course — what the researchers called the “looming stimulus.” 

The pair discovered that the amount of time a fly freezes is linked whether it is alone or in a group, and also depends on the size of the group. The bigger the group of flies, the less they froze. Unexpectedly, they also discovered that resuming movement after freezing works as a safety cue to surrounding flies. They were also able to identify specific neurons that are involved, and intend to continue to investigate the neural circuits involved in freezing and resuming action.

Brain waves with the same beat as “Call Me Maybe” induce dissociative states

Researchers elicited dissociation in mice with ketamine

Celia Ford

University of California, Berkeley

New case study shows that COVID-19-positive people don’t transfer the virus through donated eggs

If confirmed broadly, the finding is great news for those seeking reproductive therapy

Victoria Farrar

Endocrinology, Animal Behavior, and Physiology

University of California, Davis