Plastic-eating bacteria: coming to a biorecycler near you?

From: “Toward Biorecycling: Isolation of a Soil Bacterium That Grows on a Polyurethane Oligomer and Monomer”, M.J.C. Espinosa, A.C. Blanco, T. Schmidgall, A.K. Atanasoff-Jardjalieff, E. Kappelmeyer, D. Tischler, D.H. Pieper, H.J. Heipieper and C. Eberlein (2020). Frontiers in Microbiology https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2020.00404 Plastic is a problem. We pump oil out of the ground, turn it into something …

Hatching a plan: how modern genetics shed light on an 80-year old theory

From: “Transcriptome of pleuropodia from locust embryos supports that these organs produce enzymes enabling the larva to hatch” B. Koponová, E. Nichberger and A. Crisp (2020), Frontiers in Zoology 17:4 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12983-019-0349-2 When developing inside the egg, many insects develop small organs just below their final pair of legs called pleuropodia. These have been found in …

Plant oils: the future of food preservation?

From: “Insecticidal Activity of Four Plant Essential Oils against Two Stored Product Beetles”, K. Saeidi and H. Pezhman (2018), Entomology, Ornithology & Herpetology 7:3 https://doi.org/10.4172/2161-0983.1000213 Storage pests are a real problem in feeding the planet, and can result in huge losses of stored crops that have taken many months to grow. Insects, especially beetles such …

How do you put a number on what we haven’t discovered?

From: “Hidden in plain sight: what remains to be discovered in the eukaryotic proteome?” by V. Wood, A. Lock, M.A. Harris, K. Rutherford, J. Bähler and S.G. Oliver (2019), in Open Biology 9:2 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsob.180241 Proteins are the main movers in biochemistry. Genes code for proteins, and when the gene is expressed (activated), it produces its …

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