A new study shows exactly how the gene BRCA2, linked to susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer, functions to repair damaged DNA. By studying BRCA2 at the level of single molecules, researchers at the University of California, Davis, have generated new insights into the mechanisms of DNA repair and the origins of cancer. The work was published the week of March 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Greek hero Heracles fought a monster called the Hydra, which grew two new heads for each one he lopped off. Heracles was lucky he wasn’t fighting something with the regenerative ability of the real Hydra, which can re-grow its entire body from a few hundred cells. This simple water animal is helping scientists explore how some animals can regrow missing body parts.
An internal circadian clock controls the distinctive concentric rings of flowering in sunflowers, maximizing visits from pollinators, a new study from plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, shows. The work was published Jan. 13 in eLife.
A sunflower head is made up of hundreds of tiny florets. Because of the way sunflowers grow, the youngest florets are in the center of the flower face and the most mature at the edges, forming a distinctive spiral pattern from the center to the edge.
An international team has succeeded in propagating a commercial hybrid rice strain as a clone through seeds with 95% efficiency. This could lower the cost of hybrid rice seed, making high-yielding, disease resistant rice strains available to low-income farmers worldwide. The work was published Dec. 27 in Nature Communications.
Back-to-back papers in the Dec. 29 issue of Nature Plants report the first complete protein structures for plant respiratory supercomplex I+III₂. Obtaining these structures helps researchers understand basic plant biology, as well as stress responses and how biofuel crops might grow more rapidly.
Female infants are born with several million immature egg cells, or oocytes. Over the course of the reproductive years, a few hundred of them will develop into mature eggs for potential fertilization. Because of this extended maturation process, the oocytes of humans and other mammals are vulnerable to both developmental exposures and the aging process.
