Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

Another round of thanks to J.G. in S.F.@Flickr for contributing an image to BPotD (original image | Botany Photo of the Day Flickr Pool). This continues the series on the plant biodiversity of .........

Proponents of organic farming often speak of nature's balance in ways that sound almost spiritual, prompting criticism that their views are unscientific and naïve. At the other end of the spectrum are those who see farms as battlefields where insect pests and plant diseases must be vanquished with the magic bullets of modern agriculture: pesticides, fungicides and the like........

Drought-tolerant crops have moved closer to becoming reality. A collaborative team of researchers has made a significant advance on the discovery last year by the University of California, Riverside's Sean Cutler of pyrabactin, a synthetic chemical that mimics a naturally produced stress hormone in plants to help them cope with drought conditions........

Researchers at the University of Oregon have determined the fine-scale genetic structure of the first animal to show an evolutionary response to rapid climate change. They used a high-throughput sequencing technique called Restriction-site Associated DNA (RAD) tagging to make the discovery. Their results, which focus on the pitcher plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii, are published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)........

Researchers and engineers seek to meet three goals in the production of biofuels from non-edible sources such as microalgae: efficiency, economical production and ecological sustainability. Syracuse University's Radhakrishna Sureshkumar, professor and chair of biomedical and chemical engineering in the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science, and SU chemical engineering Ph.D. student Satvik Wani have uncovered a process that is a promising step toward accomplishing these three goals........

Research led by Dr Matt Hutchings and published recently in the journal BMC Biology shows that ants use the antibiotics to inhibit the growth of unwanted fungi and bacteria in their fungus cultures which they use to feed their larvae and queen. These antibiotics are produced by actinomycete bacteria that live on the ants in a mutual symbiosis........

By comparing two species of ants, Shelley Berger, PhD, the Daniel S. Och University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues Danny Reinberg, PhD, New York University, and Juergen Liebig, PhD, Arizona State University, have established an important new avenue of research for epigenetics -- the study of how the expression or suppression of particular genes affects an organism's characteristics, development, and even behavior........

Parent birds know best when it comes to taking care of their babies. But, when food gets scarce and they are forced to fly longer distances to grab a bite, "egg sitting" time drops off. What impact does this have on their brood? "I guess everybody, from a human health perspective, knows that what a mother does during pregnancy can have all sorts of effects on her babies," says Bill Hopkins, an associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Tech. He is holding a duckling in his hand. It's one of a number of he and his team are studying. "We study how these little guys can be affected by the things that mom does"........

Oyster reefs are on the decline, with over-harvesting and pollution reducing some stocks as much as 98 percent over the last two centuries. With a growing awareness of oysters' critical roles filtering water, preventing erosion, guarding coasts from storm damage, and providing habitat for other organisms, scientists have been investigating how oyster reefs form in order to better understand the organisms and offer potential guidance to oyster re-introduction projects........

A biosensor utilizing black platinum and carbon nanotubes developed at Purdue University will help give researchers a better understanding of how the plant hormone auxin regulates root growth and seedling establishment. Marshall Porterfield, an associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering and biomedical engineering, created a new sensor to detect the movement of auxin along a plant's root surface in real time without damaging the plants........