Biology

Next, they proved that the bots could swim. In test tubes containing urea, the microbots reached speeds of up to 4 micrometers per second—“one or two body lengths per second,” says Sánchez. (Humans also swim around one body-length per second.)Then it was time to show that the bots could also kill. But the team agonized over how to prove that they could actually treat an animal’s infection better than by just using passive drops of antibiotics. "That took some time," de la Fuente says.In the end, they devised a setup to…

As wildly diverse as life on Earth is—whether it’s a jaguar hunting down a deer in the Amazon, an orchid vine spiraling around a tree in the Congo, primitive cells growing in boiling hot springs in Canada, or a stockbroker sipping coffee on Wall Street—at the genetic level, it all plays by the same rules. Four chemical letters, or nucleotide bases, spell out 64 three-letter “words” called codons, each of which stands for one of 20 amino acids. When amino acids are strung together in keeping with these encoded…

Over 120 million laboratory rats and mice are used worldwide each year. Many are used to study distressing conditions like cancer, arthritis and chronic pain, and nearly all spend their lives in small, empty box-like cages: a kind of permanent lockdown.  Our new analysis shows that this restrictive, artificial housing causes rats and mice to be chronically stressed, changing their biology. This raises worrying questions about their welfare – and about how well they represent typical human patients.We identified this…

By U.S. Department of Energy May 8, 2022Systems biology studies how different living organisms at many scales interact.Microbes, plants, animals, and entire ecosystems all play individual roles in the natural world, which is a complex system of interlocking parts. Systems biology approaches the study of living organisms holistically. It investigates how various living organisms interact at various scales. Every human being, for example, is a system. Our organs, tissues, cells, and the molecules they are made of, as well…