Penguins lost ability to taste fish

 

Sensing its biotic and abiotic environmental cues is critical to the survival and reproduction of any organism. Generally vertebrates can recognize sweet, umami, bitter, sour and salty. Genetic analysis shows that the sweet, umami, and bitter tastes have been lost in all penguins.

Zhang and colleagues made the determination after sequencing the genomes for Adelie and emperor penguins. The researchers were surprised that they couldn’t find some basic taste genes, so they took a closer look at penguin DNA. This led the scientists to conclude that all penguin species lack functional genes for the receptors of sweet, umami and bitter tastes.

Sweet, umami and bitter flavors are temperature sensitive. Such taste will not be sensed in cold region. This would be one reason that they lost the gene also. Further it is known fact that penguin is swallowing food, not masticating.

Link to general articles on it:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31490623?print=true

http://news.discovery.com/animals/endangered-species/penguins-have

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/penguins-it%E2%80%99s-matter-no-taste

Link to original research paper:

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2900057-3

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Science cartoon on DNA as storage material for digital data

      Just 1 gram of DNA is theoretically capable of holding 455 exabytes – enough for all the data held by Google, Facebook and every other major tech company, with room to spare. Robert Grass and his colleagues from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are working on ways to increase DNA's longevity, with the aim of storing data for thousands or millions of years. They also tried to mimic the way fossils keep a DNA sequence intact. Excluding all water from the environment was key, so they encapsulated the DNA in microscopic spheres of glass. By using certain method they got good result. Further details can be explored from the following links:

 Article link: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530084.300-glassedin-dna-...1#.VOk1HuHYHYk

Published Paper link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract;jsessionid=977773072CF230DE602624D7793ABB5D.f04t03

Science Cartoon by Vishal K. Muliya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://vkmuliya.blogspot.com.

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Smart Phone can be used to as lab technician

A team of researchers, led by Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed a low-cost smartphone accessory that can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers from a finger  prick of blood in just 15 minutes.  Specifically, it performs an enzyme-linked immunosorbent  assay (ELISA) without requiring any stored energy: all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone. It performs a triplexed immunoassay not currently available in a single test  format: HIV antibody, treponemal-specific antibody for syphilis, and non-treponemal antibody for active syphilis infection.

Reerence: T. Laksanasopin, T. W. Guo, S. Nayak, A. A. Sridhara, S. Xie, O. O. Olowookere, P. Cadinu, F. Meng, N. H. Chee, J. Kim, C. D. Chin, E. Munyazesa, P. Mugwaneza, A. J. Rai, V. Mugisha, A. R. Castro, D. Steinmiller, V. Linder, J. E. Justman, S. Nsanzimana, S. K. Sia. A smartphone dongle for diagnosis of infectious diseases at the point of care. Science Translational Medicine, 2015; 7 (273): 273re1 DOI:  Link to research article

Science Cartoon by Vishal K. Muliya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://vkmuliya.blogspot.com.

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Newton knew plant physiology too...! 

Newton's notebook Sir Isaac Newton's interest in botany extended well  beyond the fabled apple falling from a tree - he also appears to have understood how water  moves from roots to leaves over 200 years before botanists did....!

Here I am presenting a cartoon on it.

Feel free to share it.

Science Cartoon by Vishal K. Muliya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://vkmuliya.blogspot.com.

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