A new imaging technique can give scientists a much closer look at fibril assemblies, stacks of peptides like amyloid beta, most notably associated with Alzheimer’s disease. These cross-β fibril assemblies are also useful building blocks within designer biomaterials for medical applications, but their resemblance to their amyloid beta cousins, whose tangles are a symptom of […]
Author: Ramón Muñoz-Chápuli has been Professor of Animal Biology in the University of Málaga until his retirement. He has investigated for forty years in the fields of developmental biology and animal evolution. Parasitism is very common among invertebrates, but much less so among vertebrates. The case of lampreys is well known. They attach to the […]
When we say that someone is black or white, we may think that he or she belongs to a biological category defined by his or her color. Many people believe that skin pigmentation reflects belonging to a race, “one of the main groups that humans can be divided into according to their physical differences, for […]
Just over five years ago, on 22 February 2019, an unmanned space probe was placed in orbit around the Moon. Named Beresheet and built by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, it was intended to be the first private spacecraft to perform a soft landing. Among the probe’s payload were tardigrades, renowned for their ability to […]
Inside the cells of breathing organisms –microorganisms, fungi, plants and animals– a cyclically configured sequence of chemical reactions transfers the energy provided by the organic substances –based on carbon chains– incorporated in the food into ATP molecules. This process, which we call the Krebs cycle, starts with acetyl coenzyme A (or acetyl-CoA), a derivative of […]
Source: Zhang et al. (2023) Despite their importance in our daily lives, we do not give much importance to our hands or feet, and even less at how they came to be. Even if roughly known, the process of human limb development had never been observed at single cell level resolution. Recently, Sarah Teichmann and […]
Author: Ramón Muñoz-Chápuli has been Professor of Animal Biology in the University of Málaga until his retirement. He has investigated for forty years in the fields of developmental biology and animal evolution. On October 11th, I published an article on Mapping Ignorance about the microbial dark matter, the vast diversity of microorganisms that cannot be […]
When plants are infected by pathogens, suffer from a lack of water or have to react to other external stimuli, the first thing they do is increase the proton and calcium concentration in the affected cells. The protons and calcium ions then act like messenger substances that trigger further reactions in the cell. The interactions […]
Biology • Biomedicine • Medicine • Pharmacy
One of the biggest health threats in our current society is not related to a virus, not even to diabetes or cardiovascular disease, but to antimicrobial resistance. In fact, over 5 million deaths per year are associated with resistant bacteria, of which nearly 1.3 million deaths per year are directly attributable to antimicrobial resistance. This […]
Cell division, or mitosis, is a breathtaking choreography that showcases the grandeur of life. The primary objective of this process is to meticulously separate the two copies of the cell genome, presented in the form of chromatin, and allocate them between two daughter cells. Consequently, it holds paramount significance for the reproduction of unicellular organisms […]