Joshua Trees And Rocks wallpaper
Squid symbiosis may shed light on disease
THE Japanese bobtail squid and luminescent marine bacteria live in blissful harmony: the bacteria have a home in the squid’s light organ while producing for the squid rippling patterns of light to confuse prey or predators.
[ ]…Intriguingly, that gene is the one that enables the bacteria to form a biofilm, the tightly woven matrix of “slime” which allows bacterial colonies to behave in many ways like a single organism. “The biofilm might be critical for adhering to the light organ, or telling the host that the correct symbiont has arrived,” says Mandel.
Some of the bacteria that enters human lungs is easily fought off, but can turn into a dangerous infection if some signal is given for similar biofilm to start forming. Understanding how that mechanism works in squid could help humans battle infections.
Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life
Michael Sanderson is worried. Dr. Sanderson, a biologist at the University of Arizona, is part of an effort to figure out how all the estimated 500,000 species of plants are related to one another. For years now the researchers have sequenced DNA from thousands of species from jungles, tundras and museum drawers. They have used supercomputers to crunch the genetic data and have gleaned clues to how today’s diversity of baobobs, dandelions, mosses and other plants evolved over the past 450 million years. The pace of their progress gives Dr. Sanderson hope that they will draw the entire evolutionary tree of plants within the next few years. “It’s within striking distance,” Dr. Sanderson said.
There’s just one problem. “We have no way to visualize such a tree at the moment,” he said. If they tried, they would end up with a blurry, inscrutable thicket. “It would be ironic,” Dr. Sanderson said. “We’d be saying, ‘We’ve built it, but we can’t show it to you.’ ”
Researchers are said to be looking to software engineers from companies like Google and Adobe to help in developing a way to present such a tree.
Exotic fish threaten Everglades
Walking catfish and other species pose a threat much greater than the python, the Everglades’ most notorious invasive species, The Miami Herald reported Monday
Scientists have discovered 16 exotic species in the Everglades. Exotic species introduced into an ecosystem can be every bit as destructive as toxic pollution.
