It may not be long ,when moss Physcomitrella patens can be used to produce mammalian proteins on large industrial scale. Recently researchers headed by Martin Fussenegger, Professor of Chemical and Bioengineering at ETH Zurich and PhD student Marc Gitzinger as lead author showed that moss has the unique ability to transcribe and translate mammalian genes. This is not something common as the same process does not work when a mammalian gene is put into “higher” flowering plants. The lack of producing foreign proteins makes sense also as start and finish …

Tunicates are closest living relatives of vertebrates
One of Charles Darwin’s most revolutionary idea was that all living things are related to one another (to different extents) through common decent (share common ancestors),connected to each other like branches of a huge “Tree of life”.
So what can we expect at the root of this giant tree?
At the base of the tree lies a 3.8 billions year old ancestor ,which gave rise to all living forms present on earth today.Thus making us all belong to one huge family and so by understanding the …

Tunicates or urochordates (appendicularians, salps and sea squirts) is a sub phylum of group of underwater saclike filter feeders belonging to phylum Chordata. The body of an adult tunicate is quite simple, being essentially a sack with two siphons through which water enters and exits. Water is filtered inside the sack-shaped body.Tunicates exhibit all important characters of chordates like, in having notochord, a dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal slits, and a post-anal tail. Tunicates begin life in a mobile larval stage that resembles a tadpole.The larval stage ends when the tunicate …

Alzheimer’s is the second most-feared illness in America, following cancer, and may affect as many as five million Americans. Currently, there are approximately 5 million AD patients in US and the total direct/indirect cost is $148 billion/year. As of now there is no cure for the disease ,THE ALZHEIMER’S PROJECT shows there is now genuine reason to be optimistic about the future. HBO is presenting a series of documentaries that are aimed to change how general people think of Alzheimer’s disease and also encourage everyone to put their efforts …

Drinking special African tea might be a possible cure for type-2 Diabetes in near future. Researchers collected the tea leaves from wild in Nigeria and made the tea exactly as local healers would do so by boiling the leaves, young stalks and fruit and then filtering the liquid. Using tea is not something new to African continent ,which is generally used a treatment in traditional Nigerian medicine and is produced from the extract of Rauvolfia Vomitoria leaves and the fruit of Citrus aurantium. Now recent tests in Mice first and …

As we have seen in earlier post that in Tribolium , the second thoracic segment (T2 segment) bears sclerotized elytra and T3 bears more classical membranous wings for flight.The difference between dipterans and coleopetrans in developing membranous wings for flight( Dipterans have flight wings on T2 and Coleopetrans on T3) could be due to different expression pattern of Ubx hox protein in these two insects orders. However, detection of Ultrathorax (Utx), the protein product of the Tribolium Ubx orthologue, showed that Utx, like its Drosophila counterpart, is expressed in …

The 16th Congress of the International Society of Developmental Biologists Congress will be hosted by British Society for Developmental Biology ,from 6 – 10 Sept 2009 , and the location in Edinburgh, Scotland’s famous and beautiful capital city. The meeting will cover all major topics of developmental biology and there will be a particular spotlight on stem cells and their medical potential. Congress will mark the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species” with two symposia hosted by the …