Latest Marine Biological Laboratory Stories
Marine Biological Laboratory The often damaging impacts of intensive agriculture on nearby streams, rivers, and their wildlife has been well documented in temperate zones, such as North America and Europe. Yet a new study in an important tropical zone—the fast-changing southern Amazon, a region marked by widespread replacement of native forest by cattle ranches and more recently croplands—suggests that at least some of those damaging impacts may be buffered by the very deep and...
Marine Biological Laboratory [ Watch The Video Spinal Cord Regerenation In Sea Lamprey ] Discovery will accelerate research on Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injury Scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) have identified several genes linked to human neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injury, in the sea lamprey, a vertebrate fish whose whole-genome sequence is reported this week in the...
NIH Human Microbiome Project finds patterns of microbial diversity, distributions earlier discovered in ocean ecosystems by scientists at MBL Woods Hole The landmark publication this week of a "map" of the bacterial make-up of healthy humans has deep roots in an unexpected place: the ocean. Microbial communities that live on and in the human body, known collectively as the microbiome, are thought to have a critical role in human health and disease. Five years ago, the National...
In a brainless marine worm, MBL researchers find the developmental 'scaffold' for the vertebrate brain The origin of the exquisitely complex vertebrate brain is somewhat mysterious. "In terms of evolution, it basically pops up out of nowhere. You don't see anything anatomically like it in other animals," says Ariel Pani, an investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole and a graduate student at the University of Chicago. But this week in the journal Nature, Pani...
WOBURN, Mass., Feb. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MBL International Corporation, a leading life science company focused on providing high quality products and solutions for life science research and clinical diagnostics, today announced the launch of AngioPhase(TM), an angiogenesis kit which allows for the analysis of all known phases of the angiogenic process in a convenient and flexible format. Angiogenesis is the multistep process whereby new blood vessels develop from pre-existing...
Just like people, some proteins have characteristic ways of "walking," which (also like human gaits) are not so easy to describe. But now scientists have discovered the unique "drunken sailor" gait of dynein, a protein that is critical for the function of every cell in the body and whose malfunction has been associated with neurodegenerative disorders such as Lou Gehrig's disease and Parkinson's disease. The research, which was led by Samara Reck-Peterson of Harvard Medical School and...
Research presented at ASCB annual meeting New fluorescent labeling technology that distinguishes in a single image the population size and spatial distribution of 15 different taxa has uncovered new taxon pairings that indicate unsuspected cooperation -- and standoffishness -- between members of the microbe biofilm that covers teeth, according to a presentation on Dec. 7, at the American Society for Cell Biology's Annual Meeting in Denver. Members of the genera Prevotella and...
"Macrosystems biology" funding supports predictive understanding of large-scale biological responses to climate, land-use change Biological sciences writ large, it might be called. To better detect, understand and predict the effects of climate and land-use change on organisms and ecosystems at regional to continental scales, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded 14 grants in "macrosystems biology." How will the biosphere respond to natural and human-induced changes...
One helpful action anyone can take in response to global warming is to plant trees and preserve forests. Trees and plants capture carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, thereby removing the most abundant greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and storing some of it in their woody tissue.Yet global warming may affect the capacity of trees to store carbon by altering forest nitrogen cycling, concludes a study led by Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), published this week in...
Team from MBL, West Point uses new imaging technology to 'see' camouflaged marine animals in the eyes of their predatorsHow could a colorblind animal know how to change its skin color to blend into its surroundings? And what will the animal's predator "see," looking at its prey before and after it hides?These provocative questions are addressed in article published today by a collaborative team from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass., and the U.S. Military...
