Look into the Past

To keep on my plant and environment theme, this week I found an article that looked at prairie restoration. 

The University of Colorado in Boulder started a projected examining the tall grass prairies that use to thrive throughout the middle of this country. Of course, today, very little of this original prairie grass is still around. The researchers collected 31 samples of the original prairie grass. The majority of samples came from nature preserves and graveyards. 

Much like what we have been doing in class the last couple of weeks, the researchers used DNA sequencing to identify the bacteria that is predominant in these native grasses. The bacteria identified is Verrucomicrobia, which is not very well known. The goal of this project is to examine this bacteria and see what role it played in the in prairie growth. Their experiments have also revealed that the different samples also have different bacterial make up. They would like to reconstruct what this land use to look like prior to human arrival and interactions. 

Although it is a very new study, it offers great potential for new understanding of what the land use to be before people transformed the land for crops growth. If this bacteria can be studied and reintroduced into the environment and maybe regrow the tall grass prairies, to an extent. But would people be interested in walking through an environment that recreates the original land, or would people prefer to keep the land for crop production? The reason these prairies were demolished was because of the fertile ground and potential for crop growth. 

What do you think could explain the difference in bacteria population across the different samples? How do authentic do you think these bacteria populations are to what the land use to be? After years of treatment and environment changes due to humans, from planting to power plants emissions, it's hard to imagine that the bacteria fully represents what the microbes use to be, but it gives a good starting point. 

View the article here

Clones and Epigenetics

The best epigenetic studies come from twin studies. Twins have the same DNA, yet can develop different diseases and traits. These differences arise from their environment and lifestyles.

A short article I found on Science News talked about the cloning success of a dog. The clone has near identical genome to the donor dog. The article states that clones can be used to study environmental changes and the epigenome. 

Being interested in epigenetics, twin studies, and how different factors affect the epigenome, the possibility of using clones is an interesting approach. Twins can be hard to study and it takes a lot to study them over a long period of time. Being able to clone an animal and study if over it's life time would make it easier. Having an identical genomes to compare will make it easier to identify how the epigenome affects it, what changes occur and where. Mice and rats could be cloned and be subjected to different environments, i.e. one in smoking environment and one in clean air, and see where the epigenome is affected. 

There are many ethical issues that go along with this type of study as well cloning in general. Would cloning a mouse or rat to have identical genetic material be worth it? Or is it more cruel to clone an animal just to test on it? Having identical genetic material to manipulate and then look at would pinpoint changes would be very informative.

Read this article here. 

Invasion of Humans Actually Helped!

History shows that human population expansion tends to destroy the environment that they invade. The land gets destroyed and the animal life diminishes. This is very true with the expansion of urban environments, but not so much with the Aboriginal population in Australia! Their presence in the desert helped a population of lizards thrive. 

The Aboriginals live off of the land and had to figure out the best way to collect and hunt food. Most often, lizards will run away in the presence of humans. A certain species of lizard, the goanna lizard, preferred to make their nests in the abandoned fire pits of the Aboriginals. This made them easy targets when the Aboriginals needed food. 

Now why did these lizards prefer this up-close and personal nesting area that made them targets? These small, controlled fires offered the perfect environment for biodiversity and plant growth. The lizards took advantage of this. Feeding off of bugs, these fire pits provided plenty of food for them. Once the Aboriginals moved off of their land for a period of time, the population of the goanna lizard suffered. Upon their return, the population of lizard returned. 

Although this blog isn't necessarily about molecular biology, it shows the relationship between different organisms and how the most unexpected relationships can occur. Who would have thought that the appearance of a human population would help out the animal population. Makes me happy though, human involvement does not have to destroy everything. 

Read the article here.

Cushion Plants Not for Resting

Ever wonder how some plants survive in their harsh environments? Some plants have adapted to survive, other plants use cushion plants! 

These cushion plants may look like small cushions that you would put your feet up on or relax on, but they help plants survive that are cannot handle the stress of these harsh, typically arctic, conditions. Studies done at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden examined the relationship between cushion plants effectiveness to the environment they were found in. 

Turns out the harsher the environment, the more the cushion plants do to make a suitable environment for other plants. A cushion plant creates a viable environment for plants that are less tolerable to stress of inhabitable environments. This creates a diversity within arctic or mountainous environments that might not otherwise be able to survive. 

These studies focused on arctic and mountain environments, focusing on the alpines. I wonder if there are not similar plants found in the other extreme, desert, dry environments, that help plats survive. If not, could these plants be adapted to help plants in these environments? What would that do the biodiversity that is already found in the desert?

Another possibility for these plants could be growing crops in environments that they are not normally found in. The cushion plant could supply a viable environment and increase crop growth. 

What are your thoughts?

View the article here: 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130218092545.htm

New Age Technology: 3-D Printing

I've seen articles about 3-D printing before while searching internet sites and thought it was really cool and kind of unbelievable. Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin thought so too and applied it to biology. 

There's no better way to talk about this article besides summarizing it. A bioengineer at the University of Texas in Austin used 3-D printing to create bacteria structures that bacteria could grow and colonize in. This was done by mixing bacteria with gelatin and a light active binding agent. When hit with a laser, the gelatin/bacteria mixture solidified into thin sheets that can be formed into these structures. Bacteria can work together to protect each other by encasing one another, making the bacteria inside untouchable to an antibiotic attempting to fight it. Bacteria can also form different geometrical shapes, some which are less susceptible to antibiotics. Using these generate 3-D structures, which can be any formed into any shape, researchers can study the interaction of different bacteria and get a better understanding of how these different structures increase the bacterias resistance to antibiotics. 

I don't know much about bacteria, but I thought the article was interesting and wanted to get it out there for people to read. 3-D printing offers new approaches and opportunities in biological research. Microscopes can reveal information about structure or make up of a cell or microorganism, but 3-D printing provides the opportunity to see how species interact. It also can probably be used to magnify them, imagine, big scale bacteria! What are some possible other uses for 3-D printing? 

Read the article here. The paper was cited in the article, and when I clicked on it, the page had been moved. Here is the link to the abstract of the paper (you need to have a subscription to view the full paper)

Jet Lag, who needs it!

While scanning through articles, this one caught my eye, being a victim of jet lag myself. 

Have you ever travelled over seas, or across the country, and weren't able to get the most out of your trip due to jet lag? Or upon returning home you just want to sleep all day due to jet lag? I went to Australia two summers ago and on the way there I adjusted quite nicely, but on the way back...the next few days were miserable. 

Kyoto University in Japan has been doing research involving the circadian clock. The circadian clock or the circadian rhythm, the internal clock of the body, inside mammals is maintained by a a group of neurons called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.  These neurons release a chemical called vasopressin, and the researchers at Kyoto University decided to play around with this chemical. Using mice they were able to stop cells from reacting with this chemical and discovered that the mice, when exposed to conditions that made it seem like they were 8 hours ahead of time, recovered and adjusted to their new time cycle much faster than the normal mice. The deactivation of this chemical prevented the mice from having jet lag. Read more here. 

This discovery has its benefits for sure. Traveling over seas or even across the country could go much smoother if you could adjust to the time change quickly. It would also be beneficial to those who travel overseas often for work. I have had plenty of friends with parents who have work over seas for a week or two and having to attend meetings while adjusting to the time change cannot be fun. Yes, you can drink coffee to make it through those meetings, but adjusting to the time change and caffeine boosts are two different things. Would you want to take a drug that affects the one thing that regulates your internal clock? Of course, with the amount of overtime people put in at work, or late nights student's put into school, who's internal clock is only affected by the changing from night to day? We've all forced ourselves to ignore or even temporarily change the working of our internal clock.