Author: Betty

Bacteria from tobacco plant roots provide protection against sudden-wilt disease

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A tobacco field in Tennessee (Credit: ajgarrison3. CC BY 2.0)
A tobacco field in Tennessee (Credit: ajgarrison3 via Flickr. CC BY 2.0)

As humans, we rely on the community of microbes in our gut to help us thrive. These microorganisms, collectively known as the gut microbiome, serve many purposes. Chief among them are helping us breakdown food into nutrients that our bodies can absorb and use and preventing harmful pathogens from taking hold.

So what is a poor plant to do without a gut? Use its root microbiome of course! The root microbiome is the collection of bacteria and fungi that live in the soil in and around the plant’s roots. The root microbiome is remarkably diverse and fluid in its composition. One gram of soil from the roots can contain up to one billion bacteria from as many as 10,000 different species. To compare, one millilitre of intestinal fluid from a human contains similar numbers of microbial cells but they represent only 500 to 1000 different species.1

The relationship between a plant and its microbial co-dwellers is generally one of give and take—the plant secretes carbon-rich sugars through its roots to feed the microbes and the microbes help the plants take up more nutrients from the soil and prime its immune system. Beyond this, we know surprisingly little about just what and how exactly all those microbial partnerships are contributing to plant health.

Dr. Ian Baldwin leads a group of researchers in the department of molecular ecology at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany. His team uses the wild tobacco plant Nicotiana attenuata to study the complex interactions between plants and microbes. In a paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how the root microbiome rescued plants from sudden-wilt disease. Continue reading →

A ripple effect: skipping a single exon in PTBP1 leads to changes in splicing and neural differentiation

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What makes a human, human? Or a chicken, chicken?

The preeminent belief has been that the difference between species lies in their DNA—the number of genes an organism has, the function of those genes and when and where those genes are expressed. As it turns out, the answer is not quite so simple.

“There’s very high conservation of the total number of protein coding genes across different vertebrate species,” says Serge Gueroussov, a PhD student in Dr. Benjamin Blencowe’s lab at the University of Toronto. “When [researchers] compared gene expression across different organs in different species, there was also a lot of conservation. It suggests that organisms don’t differ so much in the genes they have and the extent to which they express [those genes].”

In other words, while we may look drastically different from a frog or a chicken, our repertoire of genes and when and where we express those genes are actually pretty similar. So where is the variation coming from?

The answer may lie, in part, in a process called alternative splicing. Continue reading →

For fruit flies, sleep deprivation leads to less aggression and less sex

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The common fruit fly - a small but mighty model organism for studying behaviour. (Credit: NASA)
The common fruit fly – a small but mighty model organism for studying behaviour. (Credit: NASA CC BY 2.0)

Sleep—it’s something that we all need but can’t seem to get enough of. Not getting enough sleep can turn the sweetest, most patient person into a short-tempered and irritable crank. When you’re tanky (tired + cranky), you might say and do things that you don’t really mean, kind of like when you’re hangry (hungry + angry). While the effects of sleep deprivation on mood and mental functioning have been well documented, less is known about how sleep loss affects aggressive behaviour.

Dr. Amita Sehgal, a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, studies behaviour and its relationship with the body’s internal clock. For her research, she uses the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a model to study the interactions between sleep and behaviour. In a paper published last month in eLife, Sehgal and colleagues showed that sleep deprivation in fruit flies leads to less aggression. Continue reading →