ScienceDaily: Plants & Animals News

Southern Ontario wetlands provide $4.2 billion worth of sediment filtration and phosphorus removal services each year, keeping our drinking water sources clean and helping to mitigate harmful and nuisance algal blooms in our lakes and rivers.

Biomedical scientists have discovered a new immune pathway in chickens that viruses may be targeting. The discovery, which has implications also for diseases affecting other birds, sheds greater light on birds' immune responses to zoonotic viruses -- specifically, how those may differ from responses seen in humans.

Researchers report that a yeast cells can actively regulate a process called phase separation in one of their membranes. During phase separation, the membrane remains intact but partitions into multiple, distinct zones or domains that segregate lipids and proteins. The new findings show for the first time that, in response to environmental conditions, yeast cells precisely regulate the temperature at which their membrane undergoes phase separation.

New research into how viral proteins interact and can be disabled holds promise to help plants defend themselves against viruses -- and ultimately prevent crop losses. The study found that viral proteins interact with each other to help a virus hijack its host plant and complete its life cycle. When some of these viral proteins were disabled, the researchers found that the virus could not move from cell to cell.

All cells on Earth are enveloped in a fatty layer of lipids. Lipid membranes protect the content of the cells, including genetic information such as RNA and DNA. A new study reveals how lipids and RNA can directly interact and how this regulates RNA activity in unexpected ways. The study could help explain how RNA could be regulated in primordial or synthetic biological systems and lead to improvements in the design of RNA vaccines.

More than 70 million tons of carbon were prevented from being released into the atmosphere under a deforestation emissions reduction scheme in Indonesia -- but researchers point out this is only 3 per cent of the total required by Indonesia's Nationally Defined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.