O n November 22, 2011, Lynn Margulis, visionary biologist and tireless champion of the microbial world, died of a massive stroke. Born in 1938, Lynn was intellectually precocious, earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago at age 18 and a Berkeley PhD 6 years later. Lynn’s enduring place in science was earned soon thereafter, with the publication of her theory of endosymbiosis...

The famous theoretical biologist Hans Meinhardt died on 11 February 2016 in Tübingen. Meinhardt is well known for mathematical models of biological pattern formation, which he applied to a wide range of problems in developmental biology such as body axis formation, segmentation, limb patterning, regeneration, phyllotaxis and surface patterns — most famously the color patterns on seashells. Hans...

Todetermine useful metrics for assessing streamwater quality in the Southeastern Coastal Plain, we examined differences among two buffered and three unbuffered streams in an agricultural landscape in southwestern Georgia. Potential indicators included amphibian diversity and abundance, aquatic macroinvertebrate populations, riparian vegetative structure, water quality, and stream physical param...

of the nitrogen cycling has major consequences for other biogeochemical processes and ecosystem functions and services, Voss says. Recent research has uncovered an apparent imbalance in the nitrogen budget of the oceans, which isn’t completely understood yet and may point to additional processes that remain to be discovered. The traditional view that bacterial denitrification is the only signif...

Drug treatment of neonates and infants and its long-term consequences on drug responses have emerged in recent years as amajor challenge for health care professionals. In the current study, we use phenobarbital as a model drug and mouse as an in vivo model to demonstrate that the dose of phenobarbital and age of treatment are two key factors for the persistent induction of gene expression and c...

Box-like tetrakis(metalloporphyrin) supramolecular assemblies possessing Zn and Al metal sites can catalyze the methanolysis of phosphate triesters with a high rate enhancement, up to 430 times faster than the uncatalyzed reaction. Mechanistic studies suggest that the observed rate enhancement can be attributed to a high local concentration of methoxide ion that operates in concert with a solvo...

Motivation: Haplotypes play a crucial role in genetic analysis and have many applications such as gene disease diagnoses, association studies, ancestry inference and so forth. The development of DNA sequencing technologies makes it possible to obtain haplotypes from a set of aligned reads originated from both copies of a chromosome of a single individual. This approach is often known as haploty...

David Baltimore studied viruses and the immune system in the US during the twentieth century. In 1975, Baltimore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering reverse transcriptase, the enzyme used to transfer information from RNA to DNA. The discovery of reverse transcriptase contradicted the central dogma of biology at the time, which stated that the transfer of inform...