February 18, 2010, 10:00 PM CT

Forage Plant Fights Parasites

common pasture plant could help foraging ruminants ward off damaging gastrointestinal nematodes that can cause illness and death, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) researchers report.

Animal scientist Joan Burke at the ARS Dale Bumpers Small Farms Research Center in Booneville, Ark., along with colleagues at several universities, has patented formulations of Sericea lespedeza, usually referred to as Chinese bush clover. The plant was introduced in the United States in the 1930s to minimize soil erosion.

Adding the patented dry hay and pelleted forms of this plant to animal feed thwarts the reproductive cycles of gastrointestinal nematodes that are in the digestive tracts of goats and sheep. It is especially effective in controlling the barber pole worm (Haemonchus contortus), a nematode that attaches to the animals' abomasal (true stomach) wall and feeds on their blood. Female worms can produce more than 5,000 eggs per day that are shed in the animal's manure.

After hatching outside the animal, H. contortus larvae molt several times, resulting in a more developed and infectious larval form on grass leaves that animals consume during grazing. Once the infectious larvae are inside the animal, they suck the animal's blood, potentially leading to anemia, weakness and even death......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

February 18, 2010, 9:19 PM CT

From Carnivorous Plants to the Medicine Cabinet?

In the tropics, carnivorous plants trap unsuspecting prey in a cavity filled with liquid known as a "pitcher".

The moment insects like flies, ants and beetles fall into a pitcher, the plant's enzymes are activated and begin dissolving their new meal, obtaining nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen which are difficult to extract from certain soils. Carnivorous plants also possess a highly developed set of compounds and secondary metabolites to aid in their survival.

These compounds could serve as a new class of anti-fungal drugs for use in human medicine, says Prof. Aviah Zilberstein of Tel Aviv University's Department of Plant Sciences. In a study conducted together with Dr. Haviva Eilenberg from her lab, Prof. Esther Segal from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Prof. Shmuel Carmeli from the School of Chemistry, the unusual components from the plants' pitchers were found effective as anti-fungal drugs against human fungal infections widespread in hospitals. The primary results are encouraging.

"To avoid sharing precious food resources with other micro-organisms such as fungi, the carnivorous plant has developed a host of agents that act as natural anti-fungal agents," says Prof. Zilberstein. "In the natural habitat of the tropics, competition for food is fierce, and the hot, moist environment is perfect for fungi, which would also love to eat the plant's insect meal"......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

February 11, 2010, 8:17 AM CT

Big Cats in Serious Trouble Around the World

As a number of Asian countries prepare to celebrate Year of the Tiger beginning February 14, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reports that tigers are in crisis around the world, including here in the United States, where more tigers are kept in captivity than are alive in the wild throughout Asia. As few as 3,200 tigers exist in the wild in Asia where they are threatened by poaching, habitat loss, illegal trafficking and the conversion of forests for infrastructure and plantations.

WWF is releasing a new interactive map of the world's top 10 tiger trouble spots and the main threats against tigers. WWF is also launching a campaign: Tx2: Double or Nothing to support tiger range states in their goal of doubling wild tiger numbers by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022.

The issues highlighted in the trouble spots map (www.worldwildlife.org/troublespots) include:

• Pulp, paper, palm oil and rubber companies are devastating the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, home to two endangered tiger sub-species;
• Hundreds of new or proposed dams and roads in the Mekong region will fragment tiger habitat;
• Illegal trafficking in tiger bones, skins and meat feeds a continued demand in East and Southeast Asia;
• More tigers are kept in captivity in the U.S. than are left in the wild -- and there are few regulations to keep these tigers from ending up on the black market. The largest numbers of captive tigers are in Texas (an estimated 3,000+), but they are also kept in other states;
........


Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

February 11, 2010, 8:13 AM CT

Genome sequence for advancement

A global initiative that includes key researchers from Oregon State University has successfully sequenced the genome of the wild grass Brachypodium distachyon, which will serve as a model to speed research on improved varieties of wheat, oats and barley, as well as switchgrass, a crop of major interest for biofuel production.

The advance was announced recently in the journal Nature.

The primary international repository for the Brachypodium genome sequence data, called "BrachyBase," is situated at OSU, and helps researchers around the world make important advances for human nutrition and new energy sources.

Brachypodium is actually a wild annual grass plant, native to the Mediterranean and Middle East, with little agricultural importance and is of no major economic value itself. But it allows scientists to obtain genetic information for grasses much more easily than some of its related, but larger and more complex counterparts with much larger genomes - plants which are hugely important in world nutrition.

"Some plants are a geneticist's nightmare," said Todd Mockler, a principal investigator on this project and assistant professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology. "Wheat, for instance, is an important crop, but it has an enormous and complex genome five times larger than a human......... Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source

February 8, 2010, 8:08 AM CT

Sugar plays key role in cell division

Using an elaborate sleuthing system they developed to probe how cells manage their own division, Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered that common but hard-to-see sugar switches are partly in control.

Because these previously unrecognized sugar switches are so abundant and potential targets of manipulation by drugs, the discovery of their role has implications for new therapys for many diseases, including cancer, the researchers say.

In the January 12 edition of Science Signaling, the team reported that it focused efforts on the apparatus that enables a human cell to split into two, a complicated biochemical machine involving hundreds of proteins. Conventional wisdom was that the job of turning these proteins on and off thus determining if, how and when a cell divides fell to phosphates, chemical compounds containing the element phosphorus, which fasten to and unfasten from proteins in a process called phosphorylation.

Instead, the Johns Hopkins researchers say, there is another layer of regulation by a process of sugar-based protein modification called O-GlcNAcylation (pronounced O-glick-NAC-alation). "This sugar-based system seems as influential and ubiquitous a cell-division signaling pathway as its phosphate counterpart and, indeed, even plays a role in regulating phosphorylation itself," says Chad Slawson, Ph.D., an author of the paper and research associate in the Department of Biological Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

February 5, 2010, 8:02 AM CT

Egyptian fruit bat finds a target

New research conducted at the University of Maryland's bat lab shows Egyptian fruit bats find a target by NOT aiming their guiding sonar directly at it. Instead, they alternately point the sound beam to either side of the target. The new findings by scientists from Maryland and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel suggest that this strategy optimizes the bats' ability to pinpoint the location of a target, but also makes it harder for them to detect a target in the first place.

"We believe that this tradeoff between detecting a object and determining its location is fundamental to any process that involves tracking an object whether done by a bat, a dog or a human, and whether accomplished through hearing, smell or sight," said coauthor Cynthia Moss, a University of Maryland professor of psychology, who directs interdisciplinary bat echolocation research in the university's Auditory Neuroethology Lab, better known as the bat lab.

Moss, colleagues Nachum Ulanovsky and Yossi Yovel of the Weizmann Institute, and Ben Falk, a graduate student of Moss's in Maryland's Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, published their findings in this week's edition of the journal Science. Ulanovsky, the paper's corresponding author, was a Maryland postdoctoral student under Moss......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

February 4, 2010, 8:22 AM CT

Viagra enhances fetal growth in female sheep

A joke among two Texas AgriLife Research researchers later turned into a fully-funded study found Viagra can aid fetal development in female sheep. Female sheep (ewes) are an agriculturally important species, which can serve as an excellent animal model for studying the physiology of human pregnancy, the scientists said.

Viagra (sildenafil citrate), which is used to treat male erectile dysfunction, enhanced blood flow in pregnant female sheep, helping send vital amino acids and other nutrients needed in fetal development. The study's results not only will assist with solving fetal development problems in other livestock, but possibly in humans, said Dr. Guoyao Wu, AgriLife Research animal nutritionist and Senior Faculty Fellow in the Department of Animal Science at Texas A&M University.

"Because 5 percent to 10 percent of infants are born as low birth-weight babies worldwide, and because fetal-growth retardation is also a significant problem in livestock species, our findings have important implications for both human health and animal agriculture," Wu said.

The findings are published in a recent edition of The Journal of Nutrition (http://www.nutrition.org/).

The study originated in 2003 after a chat between Wu and fellow AgriLife Research scientist Dr. Tom Spencer when they were working with pregnant ewes......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

February 3, 2010, 7:41 AM CT

Ancient crocodile likely food source for Titanoboa

A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles described this week by University of Florida scientists in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was likely a food source for Titanoboa, the largest snake the world has ever known.

Working with researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, paleontologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus found fossils of the new species of ancient crocodile in the Cerrejon Formation in northern Colombia. The site, one of the world's largest open-pit coal mines, also yielded skeletons of the giant, boa constrictor-like Titanoboa, which measured up to 45 feet long. This is the first reported study of a fossil crocodyliform from the same site.

"We're starting to flesh out the fauna that we have from there," said main author Alex Hastings, a graduate student at the Florida Museum and UF's department of geological sciences.

Specimens used in the study show the new species, named Cerrejonisuchus improcerus, grew only 6 to 7 feet long, making it easy prey for Titanoboa. Its scientific name means small crocodile from Cerrejon.

The findings follow another study by scientists at UF and the Smithsonian providing the first reliable evidence of what Neotropical rainforests looked like 60 million years ago......... Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

February 1, 2010, 7:54 AM CT

New light on our earliest fossil ancestry

Decaying corpses are commonly the domain of forensic scientists, but palaeontologists have discovered that studying rotting fish sheds new light on our earliest ancestry.

The researchers, from the Department of Geology at the University of Leicester, devised a new method for extracting information from 500 million year old fossils -they studied the way fish decompose to gain a clearer picture of how our ancient fish-like ancestors would have looked. Their results indicate that some of the earliest fossils from our part of the tree of life may have been more complex than has previously been thought.

Their findings have been published recently, Sunday Jan 31, ahead of print in Advance Online Publication (AOP) of the science journal Nature on www.nature.com The work was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Dr Rob Sansom, main author of the paper explains: "Interpreting fossils is in some ways similar to forensic analysis we gather all the available clues to put together a scientific reconstruction of something that happened in the past. Unlike forensics, however, we are dealing with life from millions of years ago, and we are less interested in understanding the cause or the time of death. What we want to get at is what an animal was like before it died and, as with forensic analysis, knowing how the decomposition that took place after death altered the body provides important clues to its original anatomy."........ Posted by: Kelly      Read more         Source

February 1, 2010, 7:43 AM CT

Guilt by association

Researchers have created a new computational model that can be used to predict gene function of uncharacterized plant genes with unprecedented speed and accuracy. The network, dubbed AraNet, has over 19,600 genes associated to each other by over 1 million links and can increase the discovery rate of new genes affiliated with a given trait tenfold. It is a huge boost to fundamental plant biology and agricultural research.

Despite immense progress in functional characterization of plant genomes, over 30% of the 30,000 Arabidopsis genes have not been functionally characterized yet. Another third has little evidence regarding their role in the plant.

"In essence, AraNet is based on the simple idea that genes that physically reside in the same neighborhood, or turn on in concert with one another are probably linked to similar traits," explained corresponding author Sue Rhee at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology. "We call it guilt by association. Based on over 50 million scientific observations, AraNet contains over 1 million linkages of the 19,600 genes in the tiny, experimental mustard plant Arabidopsis thaliana We made a map of the associations and demonstrated that we can use the network to propose that uncharacterized genes are associated with specific traits based on the strength of their associations with genes already known to be associated with those characteristics."........ Posted by: Erica      Read more         Source