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How to Understand COVID-19 Variants and Their Effects on Vaccines
...number of other SARS-CoV-2 mutations have been identified around the globe. Some of the variants currently circulating in the population do seem to be more evolutionarily fit than their older...
DNA of Giant ‘Corpse Flower’ Parasite Surprises Biologists
...and weigh a whopping 10 kilograms, roughly the heft of a toddler. More than a decade ago, Rafflesiaceae parasites caught the eye of Jeanmaire Molina, an evolutionary plant biologist at...
A Backdoor Lets the Immune System Monitor the Brain
...have identified how evolution achieves a balancing act, limiting the dangers of immune responses in the central nervous system while still providing protection from disease. The researchers reported recently in...
DNA’s Histone Spools Hint at How Complex Cells Evolved
New work shows that histones, long treated as boring spools for DNA, sit at the center of the origin story of eukaryotes and continue to play important roles in evolution...
Secret Workings of Smell Receptors Revealed for First Time
...and discriminate among astronomical numbers of smells. It also sheds light on key principles of receptor activity that might have far-reaching implications — for the evolution of chemical perception, for...
This Animal’s Behavior Is Mechanically Programmed
...as a placozoan, has practically an entire branch on the evolutionary tree of life to itself, as well as the smallest known genome in the animal kingdom. But what intrigued...
Mitochondria Double as Tiny Lenses in the Eye
...striking parallel between mammalian eyes and the compound eyes of insects and other arthropods, suggest that our own eyes have hidden levels of optical complexity, and that evolution has found...
How the ‘Diamond of the Plant World’ Helped Land Plants Evolve
...that molecule during their evolution.) Yet the chemistry behind that ability remained blurry. It would have been poetic if Li’s early work on sporopollenin had used pollen collected from the...
Primitive Asgard Cells Show Life on the Brink of Complexity
...is now an evolutionary microbiologist at the University of Amsterdam, set out to find what they hoped would be an evolutionary missing link. Biologists had long used genetic data to...