32+ min ago   (587+ words) A team of researchers in China has sequenced the first complete mitochondrial genome of the jumping plant louse Bactericera gobica and, by combining it with nearly every other Triozidae mitogenome available, assembled the most comprehensive genetic dataset ever compiled for…...

2+ hour, 54+ min ago   (117+ words) High on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, where flocks of Black Tibetan sheep graze at altitudes of roughly 3,000 meters in China’s Qinghai Province, a routine husbandry practice is quietly rewriting the biochemical identity of one of the region’s most prized meats. Castration…...

4+ hour, 41+ min ago   (83+ words) When the first fish lineage crawled onto land some 375 million years ago, its fins had to be remodeled into limbs capable of bearing weight. Evolutionary biologists have long focused on the genes that pattern the skeleton—Hox clusters, Sonic hedgehog,…...

5+ hour, 51+ min ago   (628+ words) A new open-source software package promises to transform how biologists hunt for the genetic switches that separate males from females in species with no reference genome....

10+ hour, 1+ min ago   (620+ words) Every heartbeat, every twitch of a fin, and every dividing cell in a fish embryo depends on a molecular machine so ancient that its origins trace back billions of years. Oxidative phosphorylation, or OXPHOS, is the process by which cells…...

11+ hour, 4+ min ago   (681+ words) Across the flooded fields and scrubby foothills of South Asia lives a frog that most people, including many biologists, would struggle to tell apart from its close relatives. The burrowing frog Sphaerotheca maskeyi, a medium-sized member of the family Dicroglossidae,…...

11+ hour, 25+ min ago   (671+ words) When the tide recedes from a rocky Mediterranean shore, the mussels clinging to the stones simply close their shells and wait. Inside those shells, oxygen levels plummet, carbon dioxide accumulates, and the entire body shifts into a biochemical holding pattern…...

1+ day, 2+ hour ago   (793+ words) Stick and leaf insects are among the most accomplished masters of disguise in the animal kingdom, but their most remarkable imitation may be the one nobody watches happen. The eggs of many phasmid species look uncannily like plant seeds, complete…...

1+ day, 4+ hour ago   (918+ words) The assembly of a genomic catalog devoted specifically to bacterial and archaeal symbionts represents a meaningful shift in how large-scale microbiome resources are organized....

1+ day, 7+ hour ago   (85+ words) One of the most basic assumptions in neuroscience data analysis is quietly being overturned. A new study published in the journal Neuroinformatics shows that two groups of neurons can appear to divide their labor in the brain for no reason…...