ScienceDaily: Plants & Animals News

It happens in the first hours after fertilization: The cells of the early embryo begin to independently produce proteins, the building blocks for cells and organs. Their own, uniquely composed genetic material serves as the blueprint. In vertebrates, the starting signal for this process comes from three maternal proteins that bind to the DNA of the offspring. New findings now show, using a zebrafish model, how two of these three start proteins of the egg cell elicit their roles and how they act in further development.

Temperature fluctuations such as heatwaves can have very different effects on infection rates and disease outcomes depending on the average background temperature, says a new report.

It was a medical mystery: When scientists induced a particular genetic mutation in mouse eggs, the resulting embryos would all die in the womb within a week. And yet, people with the same troublesome gene are thriving.

Families of fish tend to share similar reactions to stressful situations, new research shows.

In image compression, a large file that could be cumbersome to store or share loses a small amount of visual information. This 'lossiness' largely preserves the image while vastly reducing its file size -- and serves as the inspiration for a new research direction in genomics, according to a professor of biomedical engineering.

Disease and health are the result of a complex interaction between humans and their pathogens. Genetic factors that partly determine host defenses sometimes differ significantly between people and populations. More genetic and immunological research in non-European populations will provide a better and more complete picture of how the human immune system works.

Researchers have just identified an ADP-ribosyltransferase enzyme that is active in the mitochondria (the organelle that generate most of the chemical energy needed to power biochemical reactions in cells) and characterized its activity. ADP-ribosyltransferases are enzymes that play a role in the modification of other proteins. The activity of this new mitochondrial enzyme, called NEURL4, is similar to that of PARP1, a nuclear enzyme well studied for its critical role in DNA damage repair and regulation of gene expression.