Latest Marine Biological Laboratory Stories

By BRYAN MARQUARD By Bryan Marquard The Boston Globe On the cusp of becoming director of the Marine Biological Laboratory during its centennial year, Harlyn Halvorson made it clear the Woods Hole, Mass., facility would have to evolve along with the research conducted on sea creatures and cells. "If the science that we do here is going to be relevant, we have to build up the year-round programs and supply the facilities for genetic engineering," he told Smithsonian magazine in 1988,...

Birds and bees may do it, but the microscopic animals called bdelloid rotifers seem to get along just fine without sex, thank you. What's more, they have done so over millions of years of evolution, resulting in at least 370 species. These hardy creatures somehow escape the usual drawback of asexuality "“ extinction "“ and the Marine Biological Laboratory's (MBL) David Mark Welch, Matthew Meselson, and their colleagues are finding out how.In two related papers published this week in...

Rapid progress fosters confidence massive project can be done; public asked for its sayThe first 30,000 pages of a massive online Encyclopedia of Life were unveiled today at the prestigious Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) Conference in Monterey, California. Intended as a tool for scientists and policymakers and a fascinating resource for anyone interested in the living world, the EOL is being developed by a unique collaboration between scientists and the general public. By making...

By Alister Doyle, Environment CorrespondentOSLO (Reuters) - The oceans are teeming with 10 to 100 more types of bacteria than previously believed, many of them unknown, according to a study released on Monday that has jolted scientists' understanding of evolution in the seas.Using a new genetic mapping technique, U.S., Dutch and Spanish scientists said they found more than 20,000 different types of microbe in a single liter (1.8 pint) of water from deep sites in the Pacific and Atlantic...

By Alister Doyle, Environment CorrespondentOSLO (Reuters) - The oceans are teeming with 10 to 100 more types of bacteria than previously believed, many of them unknown, according to a study released on Monday that has jolted scientists' understanding of evolution in the seas.Using a new genetic mapping technique, U.S., Dutch and Spanish scientists said they found more than 20,000 different types of microbe in a single liter (1.8 pint) of water from deep sites in the Pacific and Atlantic...

By Alister Doyle, Environment CorrespondentOSLO -- The oceans are teeming with 10 to 100 more types of bacteria than previously believed, many of them unknown, according to a study released on Monday that has jolted scientists' understanding of evolution in the seas.Using a new genetic mapping technique, U.S., Dutch and Spanish scientists said they found more than 20,000 different types of microbe in a single liter (1.8 pint) of water from deep sites in the Pacific and Atlantic...

MBL, WOODS HOLE, MA -- For years biomedical researchers have known that high density lipoproteins, commonly called HDLs or "good cholesterol," are responsible for protecting humans from certain parasites, but couldn't explain how. Now MBL scientists have discovered that human HDLs work this bug-repelling magic by serving as a platform for the assembly and delivery of two naturally occurring proteins that combine to create a super-toxic antimicrobial. The research, published in the...

AMSTERDAM -- Meet the smallest creature in the world's oceans: the humble microbe.It provides the planet with oxygen and helps combat global warming. A staggering number of the single-celled organisms live in the oceans which cover two-thirds of the globe, yet not enough is known about the role they play in the planet's health.An international team of marine scientists has started confronting the mammoth challenge of cataloguing and exploring the biodiversity of the marine microbe as part of...

WOODS HOLE, MA -- In an unprecedented breakthrough in the development of portable and renewable human-driven energy sources, an MBL (Marine Biological Laboratory) biomechanics expert who studies how muscle moves skeletons in fish and frogs has invented a backpack that gives new meaning to the term power walking. In a paper published in the September 9 issue of Science, Lawrence C. Rome, a University of Pennsylvania biology professor who spends his summers conducting research at the MBL, and...

MBL summer researcher Dr. Kimberlei Richardson is currently working to help solve a problem that some 350,000 babies are born with each year: opiate addiction. Richardson, a neuroscientist and second-year postdoctoral fellow in the Pediatrics Department at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, has seen the problem firsthand. According to Dr Richardson, "Baltimore has a high proportion of opiate-exposed infants. Some of these infants have been exposed to heroin, but a majority of infants are...