2020 February - 12 articles
David Deamer has written another book, Assembling Life, on the origin of life. It is unapologetically polemic, presenting Deamer’s view that life originated in fresh water hydrothermal fields on volcanic islands on early Earth, arguing that this prov...
High-throughput, in vitro approaches for the evolution of enzymes rely on a random micro-encapsulation to link phenotypes to genotypes, followed by screening or selection steps. In order to optimise these approaches, or compare one to another, one ne...
Classical resistance classifications (multidrug resistance [MDR], extensive drug resistance [XDR], pan-drug resistance [PDR]) are very useful for epidemiological purposes, however, they may not correlate well with clinical outcomes, therefore, severa...
Recent studies indicate direct links between molecular cell cycle and cell differentiation machineries. Ethylene and abscisic acid (ABA) are known to affect cell division and differentiation, but the mechanisms of such effects are poorly understood....
What is the potential for synthetic biology as a way of engineering, on a large scale, complex ecosystems? Can it be used to change endangered ecological communities and rescue them to prevent their collapse? What are the best strategies for such eco...
The microbial communities that inhabit lithic niches inside sandstone in the Antarctic McMurdo Dry Valleys of life’s limits on Earth. The cryptoendolithic communities survive in these ice-free areas that have the lowest temperatures on Earth co...
Implicit in the RNA world hypothesis is that prebiotic RNA synthesis, despite occurring in an environment without biochemical catalysts, produced the long RNA polymers which are essential to the formation of life. In order to investigate the prebioti...
In the present in vitro selection study, we isolated and characterized RNA aptamers for a tRNA-binding protein (Trbp) from an extremophile archaeon Aeropyrum pernix. Trbp-like structures are frequently found not only in aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases but...
The search for different life forms elsewhere in the universe is a fascinating area of research in astrophysics and astrobiology. Currently, according to the NASA Exoplanet Archive database, 3876 exoplanets have been discovered. The Earth Similarity...
The ciliary epithelium (CE) is the primary site of aqueous humor (AH) production, which results from the combined action of ultrafiltration and ionic secretion. Modulation of ionic secretion is a fundamental target for drug therapy in glaucoma, and t...
Protein sequence space is vast; nature uses only an infinitesimal fraction of possible sequences to sustain life. Are there solutions to biological problems other than those provided by nature? Can we create artificial proteins that sustain life? To...
The current framework of evolutionary theory postulates that evolution relies on random mutations generating a diversity of phenotypes on which natural selection acts. This framework was established using a top-down approach as it originated from Dar...
Get Alerted
Add your email address to receive forthcoming issues of this journal.
