Life sciences

Andreas Prokop , University of Manchester Fruit flies can be truly annoying when they are buzzing around your living room or landing in your wine. But we have much to thank these tiny nuisances for - they revolutionised biological and medical science.

When Burnaby eighth grader Advaith S. Iyer decided to participate in the Greater Vancouver Regional Science Fair (GVRSF) for the first time this spring an ambitious research idea emerged.

So far, it has not been possible to explain the causes of around half of all rare hereditary diseases.

Archaea cultivated in the laboratory are active even at high temperatures and without oxygen. The seafloor is home to around one-third of all the microorganisms on the Earth and is inhabited even at a depth of several kilometers.

To prevent a global health crisis, scientists around the world are searching for ways to fight bacteria that can evade the current arsenal of antibiotics. A promising target for new and improved antibiotics are riboswitches, small stretches of RNA that regulate a process necessary for the production of proteins by the bacterial cell.

A team from the University of Geneva has discovered how the influenza A virus hijacks the mechanism for importing iron into cells to invade its host.

The genomes of 233 primate species reveal key features of primate evolution, human disease and biodiversity conservation.

An unprecedented dataset containing the genetic information of 233 species promises to improve our understanding of primates- evolutionary biology.

An international research team led by Zoya Ignatova from the University of Hamburg has developed a novel strategy to suppress genetic mutations using artificially engineered transfer RNAs (tRNA).

Primate genomes analyzed by AI for clinical relevance of individual gene variants.

In microbial electrosynthesis, microorganisms use CO₂ and electricity to produce alcohol, for example. How this process works biologically, however, was previously only speculated. Researchers in Jena have now been able to confirm experimentally for the first time that bacteria use electrons from hydrogen and can produce more chemicals than previously known.

The majority of fish populations in the sea are responding to global warming by relocating towards colder waters nearer the north and south poles, according to the latest research on the impact of climate change on our oceans.