In this episode, we hear about why we always have space for dessert, how collecting seeds from large areas could help restoration projects, gut bacteria, the placebo effect and toxoplasmosis.
In this episode we hear about helping people with paralysis to communicate, how exposing mice to nicotine can affect their sons, scaffold-building parasites, the origins of handedness and plain-language summaries of research.
Considering the course of a pathogen's evolution, there appears to be interplay between secretion systems, providing unique, synergistic mechanisms to support a successful lifestyle for possibly pathogenesis, symbiosis and/or parasitosis.
Apicomplexan-like parasites originated several times independently and many of them contain cryptic plastid organelles, which demonstrate that the parasites evolved from photosynthetic algae.
Fluorescent sensors for the hormone abscisic acid have been developed using a high-throughput platform, and used to monitor hormone dynamics in plant roots and leaves.
Intracellular amastigotes of the Chagas disease agent Trypanosoma cruzi can spontaneously enter an extended state of replicative dormancy, during which time they are resistant to drug treatment both in vitro and in vivo.
The convergent evolution of unusually strict substrate specificity in apicomplexan LDHs arose by classic neofunctionalization of a duplicated MDH gene via few mutations of large effect.
The pyruvate kinase contained in the apicoplast organelle of malaria parasites makes the nucleotide triphosphates required for several processes including transcription of the organellar genome.