A new article published today in the journal Oryx examines the efficacy and perception of queen conch (Aliger gigas) conservation aquaculture – cultivating aquatic organisms to manage or replenish natural populations. 

Forests flanking Brazil’s rivers act as “highways” that have allowed tree species to move between the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests for millions of years, new research shows.

The first whole genome study of mitochondrial DNA and high-resolution scans of nuclear DNA from endangered shortfin mako sharks in the Atlantic Ocean show relatively high genetic diversity, despite severe overfishing for their valuable meat and fins. Nuclear DNA shows that mako males move freely across the Atlantic spreading their genes, but mitochondrial DNA suggests female makos return to key sites in one hemisphere to pup, confirming two distinct populations for the northern and southern hemispheres.

A team led by the Cancer Immunogenomics group at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, the Computational Biology group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute shows, for the first time, that within a tumour, the expression of the different hallmarks of cancer is not cell-specific, but rather position-specific. Under this new light, tumour architecture emerges as a valuable source of information to understand tumour dynamics and predict its sensitivity to anticancer drugs.

Why does coffee taste more bitter to some people than it does to others? Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich have now come closer to answering this question. They have identified a new group of bitter compounds in roasted Arabica coffee and have investigated how they influence its bitter taste. In addition, they demonstrated for the first time that individual genetic predisposition also plays a role in determining how bitter these roasting substances taste.