Study suggests that appetite for bushmeat – rather than black market for scales to use in traditional Chinese medicine – is driving West Africa’s illegal hunting of one of the world’s most threatened mammals. Interviews with hundreds of hunters show pangolins overwhelmingly caught for food, with majority of scales thrown away. Survey work shows pangolin is considered the most palatable meat in the region.

Scientists studied the obstacle-clearing behavior of longhorn crazy ants, where a subset of workers temporarily specializes in removing tiny objects blocking the path between the nest and large food items. Experiments revealed that serial clearing behavior can be triggered by a single pheromone mark, which happened to be deposited near an obstacle by a forager recruited to a large food item. Clearing mostly occurs in the context of collective transport, which typically stalls in front of obstacles. The authors concluded that obstacle-clearing is a form of ‘swarm intelligence’ which emerges at the colony level, and which does not require understanding by individual ants.

A University of Queensland-led project has developed a tool to standardise genetic testing of koala populations, providing a significant boost to conservation and recovery efforts.

A research team led by Professor Eiji Inoue from the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Toho University conducted a study on the Japanese weasel (Mustela itatsi). The Japanese weasel is an endemic species to Japan, but it was intentionally introduced to a number of non-native islands and its naturalization on some islands has resulted in severe negative consequences to the local ecosystems. 

A surgeon can excise breast cancer from the body, but even the most skilled scalpel may not be able to remove every cell — especially when the cells have spread from the original disease site elsewhere in the body. This proliferation and migration of breast cancer cells involves many still unknown molecular means, but researchers at Hiroshima University have elucidated at least one mechanism, involving protein receptors that bind to one another. With the discovery, they may have also uncovered how short chains of protein building blocks could serve as a novel anticancer drug.

The protein MmpL5 is an efflux transporter, a critical pump that helps the pathogen M. tuberculosis grow by scavenging essential iron. Unfortunately, overexpressed MmpL5 can also pump out bedaquiline — the first new turberculosis drug in over 40 years — making the bacteria drug-resistant. Diabling the efflux transporter of M. tuberculosis with an inhibitor would strike a double blow — restore microbial sensitivity to antibiotic bedaquiline and break the cycle that gathers scarce iron. Researchers have now solved the structure of MmpL4, a close homolog of MmpL5 that has the same function.