Biology

Some scientists looking to preserve vulnerable species have turned to a controversial technique: synthetic biology. This catchall term often means genetic engineering – introducing new genes to an organism. And a recent narrow vote by the International Union for Conservation of Nature on using the technology shows how divided scientists are on the issue of releasing genetically altered species. Science correspondent Nate Rott wades into the debate with us and reveals whether or not the Union voted to place a moratorium on releasing gene-edited species.

Creature, known as the seven-arm octopus, has been historically found in Atlantic waters: biologist

A biologist believes a seven-arm octopus was found washed up on a Pender Island beach in August. (Kathleen Durant)

It’s unclear how they may have ended up in these waters, Cook said.

“Climates are changing, currents are changing, and there's a lot of animals that are ending up over on the Pacific Ocean that maybe don't belong here,” she said.

Hypothetically, they could have been brought here in ballast water or by other means, she said, or perhaps they are native to the area and scientists have yet to figure it out.

“There's not a lot of research that I understand is happening in the deepest parts of the Salish Sea,” Cook said.

She added that while chances are slim the octopus is a Pacific species, that doesn’t mean it isn’t becoming a Pacific species.

“It seems like this specimen was doing well, it did not look injured to me,” Cook said. “It was perfectly intact as far as I'm concerned.”

Bonkers preprint, the guys generated phage genomes with AI, synthesized them, and some were actually functional viruses capable of infecting E. coli.

The title is a bit clickbait, but it was an interesting read nontheless

On Thursday, a team of researchers led by Microsoft announced that they had discovered, and possibly patched, what they're terming a biological zero-day—an unrecognized security hole in a system that protects us from biological threats. The system at risk screens purchases of DNA sequences to determine when someone's ordering DNA that encodes a toxin or dangerous virus. But, the researchers argue, it has become increasingly vulnerable to missing a new threat: AI-designed toxins.

How big of a threat is this? To understand, you have to know a bit more about both existing biosurveillance programs and the capabilities of AI-designed proteins.

To trap its prey, the Venus flytrap sends rapid electrical impulses, which are generated in response to touch or stress. But the molecular identity of the touch sensor has remained unclear. Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that triggers that response and have published their work in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

The paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63419-w

I'm looking forward to the end of that copy pasta

In short:

Australia's vet regulator approves a koala chlamydia vaccine for nationwide rollout, offering new hope in the fight against the potentially fatal sexually transmitted disease.

Vets and conservation groups say the vaccine's rollout is vital to give struggling koala colonies a chance at survival.

What's next?

Researchers are calling for government funding to help deliver the vaccine to at-risk koala populations in Queensland and New South Wales by the end of 2026.

In 2014, University of California, Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley wrote a book called The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. His controversial "drunken monkey hypothesis" proposed that the human attraction to alcohol goes back about 18 million years, to the origin of the great apes, and that social communication and sharing food evolved to better identify the presence of fruit from a distance. At the time, skeptical scientists insisted that this was unlikely because chimpanzees and other primates just don't eat fermented fruit or nectar.

But reports of primates doing just that have grown over the ensuing two decades. Dudley co-authored a new paper published in the journal Science Advances reporting the first measurements of the ethanol content of fruits favored by chimps in Ivory Coast and Uganda, finding that the chimps are consuming 14 grams of alcohol every day, the equivalent of a standard alcoholic drink in the US. After adjusting for the chimps' lower body mass, the authors concluded the chimps are consuming nearly two drinks per day.

Earlier this year, we reported that researchers had caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. That observational data was the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild. They recorded 10 instances of selective fruit sharing among 17 chimps, with the animals exhibiting a marked preference for riper fruit. Between April and July 2022, the authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume).

That's comparatively low to alcoholic drinks typically consumed by humans, but then again, fruit accounts for as much as 60 to 80 percent of the chimps' diet, so the amount of ethanol consumed could add up quickly. It's highly unlikely the chimps would get drunk, however. It wouldn't confer any evolutionary advantage, and, according to the authors, there is evidence in the common ancestor of African apes of a molecular mechanism that enhances the ability to metabolize alcohol.

The spiders in question are Stegodyphus dumicola aka African social spiders.

I couldn't find a link to the video in the article itself so here it is. Discretion is advised - it is fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

I saw this older article in the sidebar while reading that other recent ant article. I thought it was also neat and worth a separate post.

When hives of the African lowland honeybee (Apis mellifera scutella) collapse, they do so because of an invisible inner threat: the growing, immortal clone army of a rival bee subspecies.

That army is possible because the female workers of the rival subspecies — the South African Cape honeybee (Apis mellifera capensis) — can create perfect copies of themselves, with one individual found to have done so millions of times in the past three decades.

With this perpetual-cloning ability, the Cape honeybees sneak into the hives of their lowland honeybee rivals and churn out copy after copy with no need for a queen. Even worse, these clones are freeloaders, refusing to do any work.

Lots of people are excited about the idea of using plants to help us draw down some of the excess carbon dioxide we've been pumping into the atmosphere. It would be nice to think that we could reforest our way out of the mess we're creating, but recent studies have indicated there's simply not enough productive land for this to work out.

One alternative might be to get plants to take up carbon dioxide more efficiently. Unfortunately, the enzyme that incorporates carbon dioxide into photosynthesis, called RUBISCO, is remarkably inefficient. So, a team of researchers in Taiwan decided to try something new—literally. They put together a set of enzymes that added a new-to-nature biochemical cycle to plants that let it incorporate carbon far more efficiently. The resulting plants grew larger and incorporated more carbon.

Authors:

Elisabetta Canteri

Postdoctoral Researcher, Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen

Damien Fordham
Associate Professor of Global Change Ecology, University of Adelaide

Excerpt:

Caribou will likely face population declines rarely experienced in 21,000 years due to climate change. That’s the main finding from our recently published research on the historical resilience of caribou populations.

Caribou, also called reindeer, are a majestic species with remarkable adaptations to the cold Arctic environments of Eurasia and North America. Despite surviving through large climatic fluctuations in the past, future climate warming may cause a drastic decline in caribou populations. Arctic environments are extremely sensitive to climate change, and they are expected to warm two times more than the global average.

In our research, we simulated how caribou population abundance shifted in response to climate change since the last ice age to the present day, and projected it into the future to 2100. This allowed us to directly compare past and future rates of declines.

We decided to look back 21,000 years because, in the past, Arctic climates have fluctuated abruptly, with temperatures in areas such as Greenland increasing by up to 10 degrees in just a few decades. We figured that if we could identify the traits that helped caribou to survive these past warming events, we would be able to better predict their vulnerability to future climate change.

To do this we combined fossils and historical observations with climate reconstructions to map caribou habitat suitability across regions and time at a high resolution. We then used computer modelling to simulate how populations responded to changes in the suitability of these environments following the last ice age.

At long last, the version of record of our paper on the #Platynereis #connectome

"Whole-body connectome of a segmented annelid larva" is out.

Explore the rich online presentation with all the videos, figures and source data here:

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.97964

@eLife
@biology #neuroscience

https://static-movie-usa.glencoesoftware.com/mp4/10.7554/554/c20b9d5f9c6ea61298ec89e0fc5405d7cbcf801b/elife-97964-video1.mp4

Abstract An important model system for studying the role of genetic diversity and hybridization in plant invasions is the species complex of the genus Reynoutria Houtt. Within the secondary distribution range, two species of this genus are widespread, R. japonica Houtt. and R. sachalinensis (F. Schmidt) Nakai, as well as their derivatives, the hexaploid R. × bohemica Chrtek & Chrtková and the tetraploid R. × moravica (Hodálová and Mereďa) Olshanskyi and Antonenko, which are recognized as separate species. The genetic diversity of the species of the genus Reynoutria in Ukraine is still almost unexplored by molecular methods. In this work, we determined chloroplast haplotypes for samples of R. japonica, R. sachalinensis and R. × bohemica from Ukraine and other European countries and compared them with haplotypes of Reynoutria from the primary distribution range in China and Korea. The genetic diversity of R. japonica from the primary distribution range was significantly higher compared to European samples, which are mainly represented by the haplotype J1.1. At the same time, we identified haplotypes J1.2 and J1.3 specific to the Eastern European area, which probably arose as a consequence of the divergence of the chloroplast genome within the secondary distribution range. Of the five samples morphologically identified as R. × bohemica, three carry the haplotype J1.1, which is consistent with the idea that R. japonica var. japonica was involved as a maternal form in the formation of R. × bohemica. However, a chloroplast haplotype identical to R. sachalinensis was detected in two samples from the Alpine region of Europe. These samples likely represent another hybrid species of R. × moravica. Therefore, the use of chloroplast DNA markers is crucial for identifying the donor of maternal subgenomes in hybrid forms of the genus Reynoutria.