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A mating pair of wild-type (left) and mir-193 mutant (right) B. anynana butterflies. Credit: Shen Tian Lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) exhibit a splendid diversity of wing color patterns, and many species display black and white, or dark and bright, wing color pattern variants associated with the presence and absence of melanin. Many of these wing color pattern variants are textbook examples of natural selection and evolution. Iconic examples include the rapid increase in frequency of the melanic form of the British peppered moth Biston betularia, driven by the sootier and darker environment caused by carbon burning and industrialization in the…

A parrot in the incompatible group performs correctly by responding “Spread wings” while the demonstrator shows “Lift leg.” Credit: Adrian Azcárate Blue-throated macaws, a critically endangered parrot species, have demonstrated automatic imitation of intransitive (goal-less) actions—a phenomenon previously documented only in humans. In a study conducted by an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence, in collaboration with the Loro Parque Fundación, scientists reveal that macaws involuntarily copy intransitive movements. This finding, in addition to the well-known vocal mimicry skills of parrots, highlights their remarkable motor imitation abilities. The research also suggests the possibility of…

C. elegans and C. briggsae worms under the microscope. Credit: Natalie Jones, CC BY What can plants or animals do when faced with harsh conditions? Two options for survival seem most obvious: move elsewhere or adapt to their environment. Some organisms have a third option. They can escape not through space but through time, by entering a dormant state until conditions improve. As it turns out, dormancy may not only benefit the species who use it. In new research, we found that a propensity for dormancy may affect the balance of competition between species, and make it possible for more…

Imaging studies of the yeast/cyanobacteria chimeras. Credit: Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54051-1 One of the most momentous events in the history of life involved endosymbiosis—a process by which one organism engulfed another and, instead of ingesting it, incorporated its DNA and functions into itself. Scientific consensus is that this happened twice over the course of evolution, resulting in the energy-generating organelles known as mitochondria and, much later, their photosynthetic counterparts, the plastids. A study published in the journal Nature Communications explores the origin of chloroplasts, the plastids that allow plants to extract carbon from the atmosphere to build their own…

The phenomenon of “hitchhiking” by nonmotile bacteria during swarming movement. Credit: Wang Jiarong A research group has discovered an interesting way that bacteria adapt to their environment. Their study, published in Microbiological Research, reveals that bacteria can evolve by losing their flagella, the structures responsible for movement. The study was led by Prof. Wang Junfeng from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with Prof. He Yongxing’s research group from Lanzhou University. Flagella are important for bacteria because they help them move toward better environments and away from harmful conditions. However, producing flagella is…

Fruit flies in the lab of biologist Amanda Larracuente. Credit: University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster New research reveals that centromeres, which are responsible for proper cell division, can rapidly reorganize over short time scales. Biologists at the University of Rochester are calling a discovery they made in a mysterious region of the chromosome known as the centromere a potential game-changer in the field of chromosome biology. “We’re really excited about this work,” says Amanda Larracuente, the Nathaniel and Helen Wisch Professor of Biology, whose lab oversaw the research that led to the findings, which appear in PLOS…

An image of an anole (a species of ‘false chameleon’) crushing a snail with its jaws. Credit: Professor Anthony Herrel A University of Bristol study has shed light on how lizards and snakes—the most diverse group of land vertebrates with nearly 12,000 species—have evolved remarkably varied jaw shapes, driving their extraordinary ecological success. This research, led by a team of evolutionary biologists and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, offers a new understanding of the intricate factors influencing the evolution of lower jaw morphology in these animals, known collectively as lepidosaurs. The paper is titled “Ecological drivers…

Reconstruction of Melkamter pateko. Credit: Pedro Andrade About 230 million years ago, almost 80 million years before the first bird appeared, their distantly related cousins, the pterosaurs took to the sky, as the first group of active fliers among the vertebrates. Pterosaurs developed active, flapping flight with the help of a wing membrane, which was mainly spanned by the strongly elongated fourth finger of the hand. In the course of their evolution, the flight capabilities of pterosaurs improved. Whereas most early forms still had rather short wings and a long tail, the derived subgroup of pterodactyloids had slender, elongate wings…

AbstractLipid metabolism is an essential component in reproductive physiology. While lipid mobilization has been implicated in the growth of Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites in their Anopheles vectors, the role of this process in the reproductive biology of these mosquitoes remains elusive. Here, we show that impairing lipolysis in Anopheles gambiae, the major malaria vectors, leads to embryonic lethality. Embryos derived from females in which we silenced the triglyceride lipase AgTL2 or the lipid storage droplet AgLSD1 develop normally during early embryogenesis but fail to hatch due to severely impaired metabolism. Embryonic lethality is efficiently recapitulated by exposing adult females to…

Citation: Lawton ML, Inge MM, Blum BC, Smith-Mahoney EL, Bolzan D, Lin W, et al. (2024) Multiomic profiling of chronically activated CD4+ T cells identifies drivers of exhaustion and metabolic reprogramming. PLoS Biol 22(12): e3002943. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002943Academic Editor: Avinash Bhandoola, National Cancer Institute, UNITED STATES OF AMERICAReceived: September 5, 2024; Accepted: November 15, 2024; Published: December 17, 2024Copyright: © 2024 Lawton et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Data Availability: All relevant data…