Life’s insiders: Decoding endosymbiosis with mathematics Endosymbiosis, the intimate and long-term relationship where one organism lives inside another, is a cornerstone of life as we know it, and a key to the emergence of complex life on Earth. Many of the mysteries surrounding endosymbiosis are difficult to tackle using empirical approaches [...]
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. [...]
Visiting professor André de Roos pushes boundaries between disciplines and shakes up established ideas in theoretical ecology Mathematicians call him an ecologist, ecologists call him a mathematician. André de Roos is comfortable in interdisciplinary research settings, having worked along the border between mathematics and ecology since his PhD. A professor of [...]
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 [...]
SPPAT: Spatial point pattern analysis of traces Site-selectivity patterns of drilling predators revealed by spatial point pattern analysis Trace fossils left by predators on skeletons of their prey, including drillholes, repair scars, fractures, and tooth marks, are the most powerful direct indicators of predator-prey interactions available in the [...]
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 [...]
Glassiness and Heterogeneous Dynamics in Dense Solutions of Ring Polymers Unknotted and unlinked ring polymers in the melt behave very differently than their linear counterparts. The reason behind this difference lies in the closed topology of the rings and on the global topological invariance of the system. In fact, crumpled rings [...]
