Starch-Controlling Gene Fuels More Protein in Soybean Plants

A newly discovered gene introduced into soybean plants has increased the amount of protein in the plant's seed and could hold promise for helping meet nutritional needs of a hungry world.
    
Eve Wurtele, professor of genetics, development and cell biology; and Ling Li, an adjunct assistant professor and an associate scientist working in her laboratory, have placed a gene found only in Arabidopsis plants into soybean plants and increased the amount of protein in the soybean seeds by 30 to 60 percent.
The results were a pleasant surprise to the researchers as the function of the gene, known as QQS, in the Arabidopsis was previously unclear because its sequence is very dissimilar from all other plant genes.
Arabidopsis is a small, flowering plant in the mustard family that is often used in scientific research.
"Most genes contain clues in their DNA sequence as to their biological function," said Wurtele. "But this one has no sequence features that gave us any hint of what it's doing."
When the researchers neutralized the gene in Arabidopsis, they discovered the gene was involved in regulating starch accumulation, called deposition.

"Based on the changes in activities of other genes that occurred when we altered QQS, we conjectured that it wasn't directly involved in starch synthesis, but rather it may be involved in altering [the plant's] composition in general," said Wurtele. "We decided to test this concept by transferring the gene to an agronomically important plant species, soybean, which has a seed and is important as a source of vegetable protein and oil."
"We found that the QQS transgene increased protein production in the soybean seed," she added. "That was the best possible scenario."
In addition to having a DNA sequence that is not similar to any other gene in that or any other plant, the gene is also unusual because it has only 59 amino acids, Li said. The median size of a gene in Arabidopsis plants is 346 amino acids.
Li discovered the gene in 2004 and named it for her daughter.
"My daughter was a half-year old. This gene was so small and my daughter was so small," Li laughs. "QQ is my daughter's nickname in Chinese."
In addition to altering the protein-producing qualities of the gene, Wurtele hopes that the discovery may lead to greater understanding of other genes that don't have recognizable functionalities based on their sequences.
"This may give us an insight into the other genes with obscure features and provide us a window as to how they function," she said.
Wurtele hopes the discovery may help people in areas who survive on protein-deficient diets.
"We were so pleased [the gene] altered composition in soybean," she said. "What if this basic research discovery could lead to increased protein content in potatoes, cassava, or other crop species that are staples to people in developing nations?
"That would be better than I imagined."
This research is supported in part by funding from the National Science Foundation and Iowa State University's Plant Science Institute.
This patent-pending technology is available for licensing from the Iowa State University Research Foundation, which also provided technology development funds

Plant Protein Discovery Could Boost Bioeconomy

Research groups from Iowa State University and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have uncovered the function of three plant proteins, a discovery that could help plant scientists boost seed oil production in crops, thereby benefitting the production of food, biorenewable chemicals and biofuels.
      

The analysis of gene activity (by the Iowa group) and determination of protein structures (by the Salk group) independently identified in the model plant thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) three related proteins that appear to be involved in fatty-acid metabolism. The Iowa and Salk researchers then joined forces to test this hypothesis, demonstrating a role of these proteins in regulating the amounts and types of fatty acids accumulated in plants. The researchers also showed that the action of the proteins is very sensitive to temperature and that this feature may play an important role in how plants mitigate temperature stress using fatty acids.
The discovery is published online on the website of the journal Nature. Corresponding authors are Eve Syrkin Wurtele, a professor of genetics, development and cell biology at Iowa State; and Joseph Noel, a professor and director of the Jack H. Skirball Center for Chemical Biology and Proteomics at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
"This work has major implications for modulating the fatty-acid profiles in plants, which is terribly important, not only to sustainable food production and nutrition but now also to biorenewable chemicals and fuels," Noel said.
"Because very high-energy molecules such as fatty acids are created in the plant using the energy of the sun, these types of molecules may ultimately provide the most cost-effective and efficient sources for biorenewable products," Wurtele added.
Although the researchers now understand that the three proteins -- dubbed fatty-acid-binding proteins one, two and three, or FAP1, FAP2 and FAP3 -- are involved in fatty-acid accumulation in plant tissues such as leaves and seeds, Wurtele said researchers still don't understand the physical mechanism these proteins employ at the molecular level. That knowledge will ultimately allow the two collaborating research groups to predictably engineer better functions in plants.
To identify the proteins' function in plants, Wurtele's research group used its expertise in molecular biology and bioinformatics (the application of computer technologies to biological studies).
One tool the Iowa State researchers used was MetaOmGraph, software they developed to analyze large sets of public data about the patterns of gene activity under different developmental, environmental and genetic changes. The software revealed that the expression patterns of the FAP genes resemble those of genes encoding enzymes of fatty-acid synthesis. The analyses also showed that the accumulation of two of the proteins is highest in the regions of the plant where the greatest amount of oil is produced. These clues led the researchers to predict that the three FAP proteins are important for fatty-acid accumulation.
The Iowa State researchers then tested this theory experimentally by comparing the fatty acids of mutant plants lacking the FAP proteins to those of normal plants. Despite the healthy appearance of the mutant plants, the overall fatty-acid content is greater than in the normal plants, and the types of fatty acids differ.
Noel and researchers at the Salk Institute used a variety of techniques -- including X-ray crystallography and biochemistry -- to characterize the structures of the FAP1, FAP2 and FAP3 proteins, and to determine that the proteins bind fatty acids.
"The proteins appear to be crucial missing links in the metabolism of fatty acids in Arabidopsis, and likely serve a similar function in other plant species since we find the same genes spread throughout the plant kingdom," said Ryan Philippe, a post-doctoral researcher in Noel's lab.
First authors of the paper are Micheline Ngaki, a Fulbright Scholar from the Congo and a graduate student in genetics, development and cell biology at Iowa State; Gordon Louie, a research scientist at the Salk Institute; and Philippe. Other collaborators include Ling Li, an Iowa State adjunct assistant professor and associate scientist in genetics, development and cell biology; Gerard Manning, director of Salk's Razavi Newman Center for Bioinformatics; and Marianne Bowman, Florence Pojer and Elise Larsen, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers in the Salk's Skirball Center.
The project was supported in part by the National Science Foundation including the Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals based at Iowa State, the National Cancer Institute, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Ngaki's Fulbright award. Additional support came from Iowa State's Plant Sciences Institute.
Discovery of the connection between the FAP proteins and plant fatty acids could be very useful to plant scientists.
"If the researchers can understand precisely what role the proteins play in seed oil production," said Ngaki, "they might be able to modify the proteins' activity in new plant strains that produce more oil or higher quality oil than current crops."
Further, if the three proteins help plants regulate stress, plant scientists might be able to exploit that trait to develop plants that are more resistant to stress, Wurtele said. And that could allow farmers to grow crops for biorenewable fuels and chemicals on marginal land that's not suited for food crops.
All of this, she said, could point to new directions in biological studies.
"We are entering the age of predictive biology," Wurtele said. "That means harnessing computational approaches to deduce gene function, model biological processes and predict the consequences of altering a single gene to the complex biological network of an organism."

Newly Discovered Bacterium Forms Intracellular Minerals

A new species of photosynthetic bacterium has come to light: it is able to control the formation of minerals (calcium, magnesium, barium and strontium carbonates) within its own organism. Published in Science on April 27, 2012, a study by French researchers[1] reveals the existence of this new type of biomineralization, whose mechanism is still unknown. This finding has important implications for the interpretation of the ancient fossil record.
 

Cyanobacteria have long attracted scientists' attention. Capable of photosynthesis,[2] these microorganisms have played a major role in Earth's history, in particular by contributing to the oxygenation of the atmosphere. Some cyanobacteria are able to form calcium carbonate[3] outside their cell, especially those associated with stromatolites, carbonate rocks that date back some 3.5 billion years and are among the earliest traces of life on Earth. Fossil cyanobacteria should therefore be present within this type of formation. However, the first fossil cyanobacteria go back a mere 700 million years, well after oxygen levels in Earth's atmosphere started to rise some 2.3 billion years ago.
A French team[1] may have found the reason for this long time lapse. In stromatolites collected in a crater lake in Mexico and cultured in the laboratory, the scientists discovered a new species of cyanobacterium, called Candidatus Gloeomargarita lithophora. This microorganism descends from a lineage that diverged early on in cyanobacteria. Thanks to an as yet unknown biomineralization mechanism, this cyanobacterium forms intracellular calcium carbonate nanoparticles of around 270 nanometers (270 billionths of a meter). While some cyanobacteria were known to form extracellular calcium carbonate within stromatolites, their formation within the cell had never been observed. Another distinctive feature of the new species is that it accumulates strontium and barium and incorporates them into the carbonate.
This finding is significant for the interpretation of the ancient fossil record. If the cyanobacteria associated with stromatolites formed carbonates inside their cells rather than outside, they would not have been preserved in the fossil record. This would explain the time lapse between their earliest appearance (at least 2.3 billion years ago) and the oldest fossils discovered (700 million years ago). The next step is to find out why and how this cyanobacterium produces the calcium carbonate.
1 --The team is made up of researchers from the Institut de minéralogie et de physique des milieux condensés (CNRS/UPMC/Université Paris Diderot/IPGP/IRD), the Laboratoire écologie, systématique et évolution (CNRS/Université Paris-Sud), the Laboratoire de minéralogie et de cosmochimie du Muséum (Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle/CNRS), the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (CNRS/IPGP/Université Paris Diderot), in collaboration with Stanford University (United States).
2 -- Photosynthesis allows cyanobacteria to capture light energy thanks to pigments that produce organic matter from carbon dioxide while releasing oxygen as a waste product.
3 -- Calcium carbonate, of which chalk, limestone and marble are made, also makes up corals, shells of snails and other animals, and stromatolites.

Neurodegeneration 'Switched Off' in Mice

Researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Toxicology Unit at the University of Leicester have identified a major pathway leading to brain cell death in mice with neurodegenerative disease. The team was able to block the pathway, preventing brain cell death and increasing survival in the mice.
        
In human neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and prion diseases, proteins "mis-fold" in a variety of different ways resulting in the build up of mis-shapen proteins. These form the plaques found in Alzheimer's and the Lewy bodies found in Parkinson's disease.
The researchers studied mice with neurodegeneration caused by prion disease. These mouse models currently provide the best animal representation of human neurodegenerative disorders, where it is known that the build up of mis-shapen proteins is linked with brain cell death.
They found that the build up of mis-folded proteins in the brains of these mice activates a natural defense mechanism in cells, which switches off the production of new proteins. This would normally switch back 'on' again, but in these mice the continued build-up of mis-shapen protein keeps the switch turned 'off'. This is the trigger point leading to brain cell death, as those key proteins essential for nerve cell survival are not made.

By injecting a protein that blocks the 'off' switch of the pathway, the scientists were able to restore protein production, independently of the build up of mis-shapen proteins,and halt the neurodegeneration. The brain cells were protected, protein levels and synaptic transmission (the way in which brain cells signal to each other) were restored and the mice lived longer, even though only a very small part of their brain had been treated.
Mis-shapen proteins in human neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, also over-activate this fundamental pathway controlling protein synthesis in the brains of patients, which represents a common target underlying these different clinical conditions. The scientists' results suggest that treatments focused on this pathway could be protective in a range of neurodegenerative disease in which mis-shapen proteins are building up and causing neurons to die.
Professor Giovanna Mallucci, who led the team, said, "What's exciting is the emergence of a common mechanism of brain cell death, across a range of different neurodegenerative disorders, activated by the different mis-folded proteins in each disease. The fact that, in mice with prion disease, we were able to manipulate this mechanism and protect the brain cells means we may have a way forward in how we treat other disorders. Instead of targeting individual mis-folded proteins in different neurodegenerative diseases, we may be able to target the shared pathways and rescue brain cell degeneration irrespective of the underlying disease."
Professor Hugh Perry, chair of the MRC's Neuroscience and Mental Health Board, said, "Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are debilitating and largely untreatable conditions. Alzheimer's disease and related disorders affect over seven million people in Europe, and this figure is expected to double every 20 years as the population ages across Europe. The MRC believes that research such as this, which looks at the fundamental mechanisms of these devastating diseases, is absolutely vital. Understanding the mechanism that leads to neuronal dysfunction prior to neuronal loss is a critical step in finding ways to arrest disease progression."
The research was funded by the MRC.

Anthropologists Discover Earliest Form of Wall Art

Anthropologists working in southern France have determined that a 1.5 metric ton block of engraved limestone constitutes the earliest evidence of wall art. Their research, reported in the most recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the piece to be approximately 37,000 years old and offers rich evidence of the role art played in the daily lives of Early Aurignacian humans.
         

The research team, composed of more than a dozen scientists from American and European universities and research institutions, has been excavating at the site of the discovery -- Abri Castanet -- for the past 15 years. Abri Castanet and its sister site Abri Blanchard have long been recognized as being among the oldest sites in Eurasia bearing artifacts of human symbolism. Hundreds of personal ornaments have been discovered, including pierced animal teeth, pierced shells, ivory and soapstone beads, engravings, and paintings on limestone slabs.
"Early Aurignacian humans functioned, more or less, like humans today," explained New York University anthropology professor Randall White, one of the study's co-authors. "They had relatively complex social identities communicated through personal ornamentation, and they practiced sculpture and graphic arts."
Aurignacian culture existed until approximately 28,000 years ago.
In 2007, the team discovered an engraved block of limestone in what had been a rock shelter occupied by a group of Aurignacian reindeer hunters. Subsequent geological analysis revealed the ceiling had been about two meters above the floor on which the Aurignacians lived -- within arms' reach.
Using carbon dating, the researchers determined that both the engraved ceiling, which includes depictions of animals and geometric forms, and the other artifacts found on the living surface below were approximately 37,000 years old.
"This art appears to be slightly older than the famous paintings from the Grotte Chauvet in southeastern France," explained White, referring to the cave paintings discovered in 1994.
"But unlike the Chauvet paintings and engravings, which are deep underground and away from living areas, the engravings and paintings at Castanet are directly associated with everyday life, given their proximity to tools, fireplaces, bone and antler tool production, and ornament workshops."
He added that this discovery, combined with others of approximately the same time period in southern Germany, northern Italy, and southeastern France, raises new questions about the evolutionary and adaptive significance of art and other forms of graphic representation in the lives of modern human populations.

A Walk in the Park Gives Mental Boost to People With Depression

A walk in the park may have psychological benefits for people suffering from depression. In one of the first studies to examine the effect of nature walks on cognition and mood in people with major depression, researchers in Canada and the U.S. have found promising evidence that a walk in the park may provide some cognitive benefits.
   
The study was led by Marc Berman, a post-doctoral fellow at Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, with partners from the University of Michigan and Stanford University. It is now published online, ahead of print publication, in the Journal of Affective Disorders.
"Our study showed that participants with clinical depression demonstrated improved memory performance after a walk in nature, compared to a walk in a busy urban environment," said Dr. Berman, who cautioned that such walks are not a replacement for existing and well-validated treatments for clinical depression, such as psychotherapy and drug treatment.
"Walking in nature may act to supplement or enhance existing treatments for clinical depression, but more research is needed to understand just how effective nature walks can be to help improve psychological functioning," he said. Dr. Berman's research is part of a cognitive science field known as Attention Restoration Theory (ART) which proposes that people concentrate better after spending time in nature or looking at scenes of nature. The reason, according to ART, is that people interacting with peaceful nature settings aren't bombarded with external distractions that relentlessly tax their working memory and attention systems. In nature settings, the brain can relax and enter a state of contemplativeness that helps to restore or refresh those cognitive capacities.
In a research paper he published in 2008 in Psychological Science, Dr. Berman showed that adults who were not diagnosed with any illness received a mental boost after an hour-long walk in a woodland park -- improving their performance on memory and attention tests by 20 percent -- compared to an hour-long stroll in a noisy urban environment. The findings were reported by The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and in the Pulitzer Prize finalist book by Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains.
In this latest study, Dr. Berman and his research team explored whether a nature walk would provide similar cognitive benefits, and also improve mood for people with clinical depression. Given that individuals with depression are characterized by high levels of rumination and negative thinking, the researchers were skeptical at the outset of the study that a solitary walk in the park would provide any benefit at all and may end up worsening memory and exacerbating depressed mood.
For the study, 20 individuals were recruited from the University of Michigan and surrounding Ann Arbor area; all had a diagnosis of clinical depression. The 12 females and eight males (average age 26) participated in a two-part experiment that involved walking in a quiet nature setting and in a noisy urban setting. Prior to the walks, participants completed baseline testing to determine their cognitive and mood status. Before beginning a walk, the participants were asked to think about an unresolved, painful autobiographical experience. They were then randomly assigned to go for an hour-long walk in the Ann Arbor Arboretum (woodland park) or traffic heavy portions of downtown Ann Arbor. They followed a prescribed route and wore a GPS watch to ensure compliance. After completing their walk, they completed a series of mental tests to measure their attention and short-term/working memory and were re-assessed for mood. A week later the participants repeated the entire procedure, walking in the location that was not visited in the first session.
Participants exhibited a 16 percent increase in attention and working memory after the nature walk relative to the urban walk. Interestingly, interacting with nature did not alleviate depressive mood to any noticeable degree over urban walks, as negative mood decreased and positive mood increased after both walks to a significant and equal extent. Dr. Berman says this suggests that separate brain mechanisms may underlie the cognitive and mood changes of interacting with nature.
The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and a private grant from the TKF Foundation.

First Gene Therapy Successful Against Aging-Associated Decline: Mouse Lifespan Extended Up to 24% With a Single Treatment

A new study consisting of inducing cells to express telomerase, the enzyme which -- metaphorically -- slows down the biological clock -- was successful. The research provides a "proof-of-principle" that this "feasible and safe" approach can effectively "improve health span."
     

A number of studies have shown that it is possible to lengthen the average life of individuals of many species, including mammals, by acting on specific genes. To date, however, this has meant altering the animals' genes permanently from the embryonic stage -- an approach impracticable in humans. Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), led by its director María Blasco, have demonstrated that the mouse lifespan can be extended by the application in adult life of a single treatment acting directly on the animal's genes. And they have done so using gene therapy, a strategy never before employed to combat aging. The therapy has been found to be safe and effective in mice.
The results were recently published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. The CNIO team, in collaboration with Eduard Ayuso and Fátima Bosch of the Centre of Animal Biotechnology and Gene Therapy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), treated adult (one-­‐year-­‐old) and aged (two-­‐year-­‐old) mice, with the gene therapy delivering a "rejuvenating" effect in both cases, according to the authors.
Mice treated at the age of one lived longer by 24% on average, and those treated at the age of two, by 13%. The therapy, furthermore, produced an appreciable improvement in the animals' health, delaying the onset of age-­‐related diseases -- like osteoporosis and insulin resistance -- and achieving improved readings on aging indicators like neuromuscular coordination.
The gene therapy consisted of treating the animals with a DNA-­modified virus, the viral genes having been replaced by those of the telomerase enzyme, with a key role in aging. Telomerase repairs the extreme ends or tips of chromosomes, known as telomeres, and in doing so slows the cell's and therefore the body's biological clock. When the animal is infected, the virus acts as a vehicle depositing the telomerase gene in the cells.
This study "shows that it is possible to develop a telomerase-­based anti-­aging gene therapy without increasing the incidence of cancer," the authors affirm. "Aged organisms accumulate damage in their DNA due to telomere shortening, [this study] finds that a gene therapy based on telomerase production can repair or delay this kind of damage," they add.
'Resetting' the biological clock
Telomeres are the caps that protect the end of chromosomes, but they cannot do so indefinitely: each time the cell divides the telomeres get shorter, until they are so short that they lose all functionality. The cell, as a result, stops dividing and ages or dies. Telomerase gets around this by preventing telomeres from shortening or even rebuilding them. What it does, in essence, is stop or reset the cell's biological clock.
But in most cells the telomerase gene is only active before birth; the cells of an adult organism, with few exceptions, have no telomerase. The exceptions in question are adult stem cells and cancer cells, which divide limitlessly and are therefore immortal -- in fact several studies have shown that telomerase expression is the key to the immortality of tumour cells.
It is precisely this risk of promoting tumour development that has set back the investigation of telomerase-­‐based anti-­‐aging therapies.
In 2007, Blasco's group demonstrated that it was feasible to prolong the lives of transgenic mice, whose genome had been permanently altered at the embryonic stage, by causing their cells to express telomerase and, also, extra copies of cancer-­‐resistant genes. These animals live 40% longer than is normal and do not develop cancer.
The mice subjected to the gene therapy now under test are likewise free of cancer. Researchers believe this is because the therapy begins when the animals are adult so do not have time to accumulate sufficient number of aberrant divisions for tumours to appear.
Also important is the kind of virus employed to carry the telomerase gene to the cells. The authors selected demonstrably safe viruses that have been successfully used in gene therapy treatment of hemophilia and eye disease. Specifically, they are non-­‐replicating viruses derived from others that are non-­‐pathogenic in humans.
This study is viewed primarily as "a proof-­‐of-­‐principle that telomerase gene therapy is a feasible and generally safe approach to improve healthspan and treat disorders associated with short telomeres," state Virginia Boccardi (Second University of Naples) and Utz Herbig (New Jersey Medical School-­‐University Hospital Cancer Centre) in a commentary published in the same journal.
Although this therapy may not find application as an anti-­‐aging treatment in humans, in the short term at least, it could open up a new treatment option for ailments linked with the presence in tissue of abnormally short telomeres, as in some cases of human pulmonary fibrosis.
More healthy years
As Blasco says, "aging is not currently regarded as a disease, but researchers tend increasingly to view it as the common origin of conditions like insulin resistance or cardiovascular disease, whose incidence rises with age. In treating cell aging, we could prevent these diseases."
With regard to the therapy under testing, Bosch explains: "Because the vector we use expresses the target gene (telomerase) over a long period, we were able to apply a single treatment. This might be the only practical solution for an anti-­‐aging therapy, since other strategies would require the drug to be administered over the patient's lifetime, multiplying the risk of adverse effects."

Parasite Arms Race Spurs Color Change in Bird Eggs

The eggs laid by two African bird species have evolved different color patterns over a period of just 40 years, according to new research published in The American Naturalist. The quick change appears to be driven by an unwanted guest in the nest.
     

Cuckoo finches are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, hoping to trick someone else into raising their young. To help keep their imposter eggs from being evicted, the cuckoo eggs have evolved to look a lot like those of its most common target, the tawny-flanked prinia. But prinias have evolved a defense. Their eggs have complex patterns of spots and squiggles and can vary substantially in color from female to female. The variable colors and patterns mean the cuckoo eggs aren't always a good match, and prinias can often spot them and toss them out of the nest.
University of Cambridge researchers Claire Spottiswoode and Martin Stevens show that the cuckoo's mimicry -- and the prinia's defenses against it -- have caused the appearance of both species' eggs to change over time.
In the course of their research in Zambia, Spottiswoode and Stevens noticed that cuckoo and prinia eggs they were seeing in the wild differed markedly from those in a museum collection made at their study site. "For example, 30 years ago, cuckoo finches predominantly laid eggs that look red to our eyes, but now lay mainly blue ones," Stevens said. "Prinias in turn now more commonly lay olive-colored eggs, perhaps to escape their pursuing parasite."
To test these observations, the researchers used computer models that quantified changes on spot pattern and color in past and present eggs. Their models were calibrated to view the eggs through a bird's eyes, which are better than ours at seeing colors and distinguishing ultraviolet light.
The models confirmed the observation. The eggs are changing colors, and fast. The changes detected in this study happened over the course of just 40 years, a period "that is a mere blink of an evolutionary eye," Stevens said.
The research offers a prime example of an evolutionary arms race between parasite and host, the researchers say. The dominant color pattern of prinia eggs serves as a good defense only until the cuckoos catch up. At that point, natural selection should begin favor prinias that lay eggs with new colors, which make the cuckoo eggs stand out. In effect, the two species appear to be locked in a perpetual race around the color specrum.
"Just as humans need to invent new drugs to defeat evolving bacteria and viruses, so host defenses undergo rapid changes to evade cuckoos," Spottiswoode said.

Color of Robins' Eggs Determines Parental Care

A male robin will be more diligent in caring for its young if the eggs its mate lays are a brighter shade of blue.

Queen's University biology professor Bob Montgomerie has been studying robins on and off for 25 years and has a particular fascination with the bright blue colour of their eggs. To test a theory on the purpose of bright egg colouration, Dr. Montgomerie and MSc student Philina English, working at the Queen's University Biological Station (QUBS) and other sites around Kingston, replaced the real eggs in robins' nests with artificial eggs of different shades of blue.
Just before the real eggs would have hatched, the researchers replaced the artificial eggs with baby robins.
"We were testing the idea males can use egg colour as a signal of the quality and health of their mate, and that healthy mates create better babies," says Dr. Montgomerie, whose research focuses on sexual selection and parental care in birds. "Sure enough, males whose nests contained the brightest blue eggs fed their newly-hatched babies twice as much."
The blue colour in robin eggs is due to biliverdin, a pigment deposited on the eggshell when the female lays the eggs. There is some evidence that higher biliverdin levels indicate a healthier female and brighter blue eggs. Eggs laid by a healthier female seemed to encourage males to take more interest in their young.
The paper was published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Bees 'may improve robot vision'

WASHINGTON: Scientists have shown that a honeybee's brain is sophisticated enough to learn rules and process visual problems, a finding which they claim suggests a robot could one day do the same.

An international team claims that honeybees also use multiple rules to solve complex visual problems, which has important implications for our understanding of how cognitive capacities for viewing complex images evolved in brains.

Lead author Dr Adrian Dyer at RMIT University in Australia said that rule learning was a fundamental cognitive task that allowed humans to operate in complex environments.

"For example, if a driver wants to turn right at an intersection then they need to simultaneously observe the traffic light colour, the flow of oncoming cars and pedestrians to make a decision.

"With experience, our brains can conduct these complex decision-making processes, but this is a type of cognitive task beyond current machine vision.

"Our research collaboration between labs in Australia and France wanted to understand if such simultaneous decision making required a large primate brain, or whether a honeybee might also demonstrate rule learning," he said in a release.

For their study, the researchers trained individual honeybees to fly into a Y-shaped maze which presented different elements in specific relationships like above/below, or left/right.