Metabolism: not the limiting factor in prokaryotic endosymbiosis “One of the great mysteries of biology,” says Eric Libby, former SFI Postdoctoral Fellow, now an associate professor at the Integrated Science Lab (IceLab), Umeå University in Sweden, “is eukaryogenesis, or how eukaryotes arose.” Scientists consider this to be a period of major evolutionary transition, critical to [...]
Madagascar's biodiversity acutely threatened Madagascar exhibits an enormous biodiversity - most of the plant and animal species in Madagascar are found nowhere else on earth. According to researchers from over 50 different organizations (including IceLab) and universities writing in the journal Science, the rich life on the island is acutely threatened. [...]
Gradual changes triggered historical shift in marine fauna Large asteroids or comets hitting Earth, massive volcanic eruptions and other single, deadly events are usually the focus for scientists seeking to reconstruct Earth’s past mass extinctions. In a new study, researchers from Umeå University and the University of Florida instead uncovered a [...]
The distribution of vertebrate animals redefines temperate and cold climate regions The distribution of vegetation is routinely used to classify climate regions worldwide, yet whether these regions are relevant to other organisms is unknown. Umeå researchers have established climate regions based on vertebrate species' distributions in a new study published in [...]
How long does it take a protein to find a target on our DNA? The problem To get many different processes started in our nucleus, we need proteins to bind to specific sequences on our DNA. For example, the gene-editing tool CRISPR/CAS9 needs to locate a [...]
Species of animals and plants with low abundances organize in ghettos to survive Similar to the organization of human cities, animal and plant communities have ghettos or ethnic neighborhoods, where low-abundant species group to enhance their persistence against more competitive species. This unexpected ecological pattern is the [...]
