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What the study shows, the researchers said, is that the interactions between the bacterial populations are as significant to the host’s overall fitness as their presence — the microbiome’s influence cannot be solely attributed to the presence or absence of individual species. “In a sense,” said Jones, “the microbiome’s influence on the host is more than the sum of its parts.”

The gut microbiome — the world of microbes that inhabit the human intestinal tract — has captured the interest of scientists and clinicians for its critical role in health. However, parsing which of those microbes are responsible for effects on our wellbeing remains a mystery.

Taking us one step closer to solving this puzzle, UC Santa Barbara physicists Eric Jones and Jean Carlson have developed a mathematical approach to analyze and model interactions between gut bacteria in fruit flies. This method could lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the complex interactions between human gut microbes.

Continue reading “Modeling the Microbiome” »

What would it be like to live through our own species’ evolution? The biological process of natural selection that gave rise to every species on Earth takes hundreds of generations to turn one species into another, but what if that process could be skipped entirely?

A look at the future of transhumanist technologies and what their evolution will mean for our society.

Continue reading “The Transhuman Revolution: What it is and How to Prepare for its Arrival” »

A whale that lived 33 million years ago when present-day Oregon was part of the ocean floor has been newly named after a curator at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

And Elizabeth Nesbitt’s whale isn’t your typical cetacean: An analysis of the fossil, published in the Nov. 29 issue of Current Biology, suggests that Maiabalaena nesbittae bridged a gap between species of whales that had teeth and species that have a different mouth-feeding mechanism known as baleen.

“For the first time, we can now pin down the origin of filter-feeding, which is one of the major innovations in whale history,” study co-author Nicholas Pyenson, the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of fossil marine mammals and an affiliate curator at the Burke Museum, said in a news release.

Continue reading “Fossil named after Burke Museum curator tells whale of a tale” »

Hydrogels are physical and chemical polymer networks capable of retaining large quantities of liquid in aqueous conditions without losing their dimensional stability. They are used in a whole host of applications, and in combination with other components and they acquire specific properties such as electrical conductivity. The Materials + Technology research group in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Environment of the UPV/EHU’s Faculty of Engineering selected a biopolymer that had not previously been used for applications of this type: starch. “One of our lines of research focuses on starch, and we regard it as having biological, physical and chemical properties suitable for producing hydrogels,” said Kizkitza Gonzalez-Munduate, a member of the group.

Corals and the microbes they host evolved together, new research by Oregon State University shows.

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“Artificial Intelligence is not just a large part of a technological revolution, it’s a major part of a human evolution of going beyond the limits of an environmentally programmed human biological operating system.”

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Canadian scientists have identified microscopic creatures that are so unlike anything seen before, they had to create an entirely new branch on the evolutionary tree of life to slot them in.

A new paper published this week in Nature offers the first genetic analysis of hemimastigotes—a rare and poorly understood group of single-celled microorganisms. Biologists have known about these wee beasties for well over a century, but only now can hemimastigotes be officially slotted into the evolutionary tree of life, a process more formally known as phylogeny. And by doing so, scientists have stumbled upon a completely new branch on the tree of life—one dating back billions of years.

Researchers from the Departments of Chemistry and Engineering Science at the University of Oxford have found a general way of predicting enzyme activity. Enzymes are the protein catalysts that perform most of the key functions in Biology. Published in Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers’ novel AI approach is based on the enzyme’s sequence, together with the screening of a defined ‘training set’ of substrates and the right chemical parameters to define them.

Scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—have used ultrabright x-rays to image single bacteria with higher spatial resolution than ever before. Their work, published in Scientific Reports, demonstrates an X-ray imaging technique, called X-ray fluorescence microscopy (XRF), as an effective approach to produce 3D images of small biological samples.