Species, extinct before we know them?

Species, extinct before we know them?

Species are going extinct rapidly, while taxonomic catalogues are still incomplete for even the best-known taxa. Intensive fieldwork is finding species so rare and threatened that some become extinct within years of discovery. Recent bird extinctions in Brazil's coastal forests suggest that some species may have gone extinct before we knew of their existence.

Aliens — as we know them

Cis-spliced acceptors can be converted to trans-splicing acceptors if the donor site upstream is mutated, and similarly an SL addition site will be cis-spliced if a donor site is inserted upstream. What is the function of SL trans-splicing? SL addition provides the cell with an alternative way of capping mRNAs, a modification required for mRNA stability, transport and translation. The standard ...

Mitochondria as we don't know them.

Biochemistry textbooks depict mitochondria as oxygen-dependent organelles, but many mitochondria can produce ATP without using any oxygen. In fact, several other types of mitochondria exist and they occur in highly diverse groups of eukaryotes - protists as well as metazoans - and possess an often overlooked diversity of pathways to deal with the electrons resulting from carbohydrate oxidation....

Databases, But Not As We Know Them

Response to comments on "Can we name Earth's species before they go extinct?".

Mora et al. disputed that most species will be discovered before they go extinct, but not our main recommendations to accelerate species' discoveries. We show that our conclusions would be unaltered by discoveries of more microscopic species and reinforce our estimates of species description and extinction rates, that taxonomic effort has never been greater, and that there are 2 to 8 million sp...