We’re pleased to announce two new sections added to existing F1000 Faculties: ‘Aging‘ in the Developmental Biology Faculty ‘Viral hepatis‘ in the Gastroenterology & Hepatology Faculty In honour of these, here’s a couple of choice picks from these sections: From the Aging section, a study that provides the first demonstration that epigenetic changes can influence…
The link between gum disease and rheumatoid arthritis is revisited in a recently evaluated paper.
This little guy, sometimes known as the ‘kissing bug’ (because it likes to eat your face), feeds off fresh blood and is responsible for spreading Trypanosoma cruzii–which causes Chagas disease. To this charming CV, Claudio Lazzari and colleagues at the Institut de Recherche sur la Biologie de l’Insecte in Tours have just added learning ability.…
When you come to write up your lab results and publish them (whether in a journal or your dissertation), one of the things you have to do is write up how you did everything–the methods section. In fact, it’s usually a good idea to write up your methods well before this point, but that’s another…
The link between red meat and diabetes, and spinach gets even better.
Incorporating artificial bases into DNA: letting evolution take the strain creates a genetic firewall.
And does it matter? There’s a long discussion on the F1000 website about a paper in PLoS Biology on the number of species in the world. Robert May seems to think that the first question a visiting alien species might ask us is, “How many distinct life forms—species—does your planet have?”–rather than the more practical…
Probiotics, live microbial supplements marketed on the basis of improving the microbial “balance” in the human gut, account for a growing market–perhaps 10 billion Euro in Europe alone(source). While probiotics are apparently a market (and marketing success)–indeed it’s getting ever more difficult to buy yogurt that isn’t probiotic–whether there is even such a thing as…
The ethics of disability is complex. Ordinarily, you’d think that if something is wrong, medically, and we have the means to fix it (as long as it’s not a Pyrrhic fix), then there is an ethical imperative to do so. In the case of deafness, this principle turns out to be not so simple. A…
Q: When is a gene not a gene? A: When it’s a paralogue. As a joke, that could probably use some work. But it touches the core of genome annotation, and how we can estimate the functions of genes in non-model organisms (i.e. in organisms where it is difficult if not impossible to directly determine…
