BiotechNews1

  Originally published by University of Queensland on June 23, 2023 Credit: Dr Léonie Huijser University of Queensland researchers have found bottlenose dolphins in Moreton Bay off Brisbane could be teaching other dolphins to "beg" for food from recreational fishers, with the behavior creating short and long-term risks. Dr. Léonie Huijser from UQ's School of Veterinary Science made the surprise discovery as she investigated the social structure of Moreton Bay's population of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins for her Ph.D. thesis. "Within the dolphins' social network , I found a cluster that would consistently patrol moored boats, waiting for recreational fishers to illegally toss them discarded bait or catches ," Dr. Huijser said. "Fishing is popular in the bay and it seems some dolphins have learned to exploit it." Read more

Originally published by University of Bristol on June 20, 2023 Levitating droplets. Each of these droplets have a single SARS-CoV-2 viral particle. The droplets look like lines because they are rapidly moving in an electrodynamic field. Credit: University of Bristol Critical insights into why airborne viruses lose their infectivity have been uncovered by scientists at the University of Bristol . The findings, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface today, reveal how cleaner air kills the virus significantly quicker and why opening a window may be more important than originally thought. The research could shape future mitigation strategies for new viruses. In the first study to measure differences in airborne stability of different variants of SARS-CoV-2 in inhalable particles , researchers from Bristol's School of Chemistry show that the virus has become less capable of surviving in the air as it has evolved from the original strain through to the del...

Originally published by Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine on June 19, 2023   Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain People who owned black-and-white television sets until the 1980s didn't know what they were missing until they got a color TV. A similar switch could happen in the world of genomics as researchers at the Berlin Institute of Medical Systems Biology of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB) have developed a technique called Genome Architecture Mapping ("GAM") to peer into the genome and see it in glorious technicolor. GAM reveals information about the genome's spatial architecture that is invisible to scientists using solely Hi-C, a workhorse tool developed in 2009 to study DNA interactions, reports a new study in Nature Methods by the Pombo lab . "With a black-and-white TV, you can see the shapes but everything looks gray," says Professor Ana Pombo , a molecular biologist and head of the Epigenetic Regulation and Chromatin Archit...