News by Subject Biology

In a new study published Feb. 26, 2020 in Biology Letters, the research team demonstrated for the first time that the number of soldiers in a trematode colony depends on the local invasion threat, showing that such societies produce greater standing armies in areas of greater threat. This has big implications for understanding how animal societies determine their resource allocation.

In the quest to develop more effective treatments for parasitic diseases, scientists look for weaknesses in the organisms' molecular machinery. A team of College of Science researchers at Clemson recently contributed to that understanding by discovering the function of a specific protein in the three related parasites that cause African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis -- diseases that are sometimes fatal and afflict millions worldwide.

Biologists at the University of Toronto have successfully tested a new strategy for identifying genetic resources critical for the ongoing battle against plant pathogens such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses that infect and destroy food crops worldwide. By focusing on the disease-associated genes available to pathogens, and the defenses available to plants, they have developed a new approach for identifying plant immune receptors, which is a genetic resource in short supply in agricultural breeding.

An innovative -- and inexpensive -- technique targets mosquito larvae where they live.

Brain-eating amoebae can cause particularly harmful forms of encephalitis, and more than 95% of people who develop these rare but devastating infections die. Despite the high mortality rate, there is currently no single effective drug available to fight these microbes. Now, however, researchers have designed some new compounds that show promise in the laboratory as treatments, according to a report in ACS Chemical Neuroscience.