The proceedings of the 10th Symposium on Lactic Acid Bacteria (LAB10) are published today in Microbial Cell Factories. The LAB10 Symposium brings together experts, every three years, to share scientific knowledge of Lactobacilli. These bacteria share an intimate history with humans, having been ever-present in our food and forming part of our normal gut microbiota…. Read more »
Wild black bears are remarkable animals. They can spend half their lives in a state of hibernation without access to food or water and yet are still able to rouse and defend themselves if disturbed. In an article published in BMC Physiology, Paul Iaizzo and colleagues have, for the first time, provided a fascinating new… Read more »
The August issue of Genome Biology is now available on our website, and it’s a bumper issue this month. As well as several high-quality research articles (such as the wallaby genome sequence, the transcriptome of regenerating heads in planarians and a comprehensive screen for substrates of the Chk1 checkpoint kinase), we have a number of… Read more »
Accompanying the publication of the tammar wallaby genome sequence in Genome Biology, BioMed Central also has a pouchful of companion articles in a cross-journal article series. The focus of several of these studies is on the insights that the genome sequence offers into marsupial immune systems. Emily Wong and colleagues present a database of immune… Read more »
If the date is January 22nd and you happen to be a tammar wallaby, the chances are high that it will be your birthday – as well as the anniversary of your conception. In between these two events, you will have spent eleven months in suspended animation, followed by a short one month gestation (in… Read more »
Bio-prospecting for naturally occurring enzymes, involved in decay and digestion, is an appealing strategy to find better ways to convert woody and recalcitrant biomass into biofuel. Work just published in Biotechnology for Biofuels, by Luen-Luen Li and colleagues, takes a meta-genomics approach to this search. High-throughput sequencing of microbial decay communities in poplar biomass identified… Read more »
In an editorial on the debate surrounding the role and abundance of “dark matter” RNA, BMC Biology concluded that we need to know more about the function of specific non-coding RNAs before we can make more general judgments about their role. So what do we know about ncRNA function so far? Quite a lot –… Read more »
Neural Systems & Circuits is publishing a special thematic series dedicated to advances in invertebrate circuitry research. The series intends to provide the reader with an overview of new and exciting developments in the field, and will publish reviews and research from key scientists working on diverse model organisms, using either computational or experimental approaches…. Read more »
Genome Biology’s recent waltz around the 19th Annual Conference on Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB) in Vienna gave us a quickstep tour around the current developments in the computational biology community, including advances in the fields of personalized medicine and the genomic “data deluge”. It also highlighted the acute awareness that computational biologists have… Read more »