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Visualizing Cell Biology with Correlative Microscopy at Utrecht University – Video

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Visualizing Cell Biology with Correlative Microscopy at Utrecht University
Professor Jan Andries Post, PhD and Matthia Karreman, PhD candidate of Utrecht University in the Netherlands discuss their research using correlative microscopy and the new FEI Tecnai with iCorr. Watch a full demonstration of this new system at fei.comFrom:FEICompanyViews:0 0ratingsTime:04:23More inScience Technology

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Visualizing Cell Biology with Correlative Microscopy at Utrecht University - Video

Walk Away (Original Song) – Video

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Walk Away (Original Song)
words and music by myself. Well times getting on and ive left it too long to tell you i like you so ill take a walk and ill wander home back to my lonely room and for where i was stood it were clear every guys eyes were on you in the room and it got me to thinking what it would be like to be you and every guy just adore you so i choose to ignore you cause it must get pretty boring when ever guy here is just falling for you and i dont just wanna be a slave to biology and if lifes just a game then i dont wanna play i just turn my head and walk away.From:Jason VayleViews:0 0ratingsTime:03:38More inMusic

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Walk Away (Original Song) - Video

Community Ecology: Feel the Love – Crash Course Ecology #4 – Video

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Community Ecology: Feel the Love - Crash Course Ecology #4
Interactions between species are what define ecological communities, and community ecology studies these interactions anywhere they take place. Although interspecies interactions are mostly competitive, competition is pretty dangerous, so a lot of interactions are actually about side-stepping direct competition and instead finding ways to divvy up resources to let species get along. Feel the love? Like CrashCourse! http://www.facebook.com Follow CrashCourse! http://www.twitter.com Table of Contents 1) Competitive Exclusion Principle 2:02 2) Fundamental vs. Realized Niche 3:48 3) Eco-lography / Resource Partitioning 5:25 4) Character Displacement 7:29 5) Mutualism 9:15 6) Commensalism 9:55 References for this episode can be found in the Google document here: dft.ba crashcourse, ecology, biology, competition, evolution, survival, habitat, species, interaction, communities, community ecology, resource, animal, limiting factors, competitive exclusion principle, success, paramecium, competitive advantage, extinction, food, prey, diversity, life, adaptation, niche, security, stability, fundamental niche, realized niche, conflict, nature, natural order, robert macarthur, warbler, ecologist, yale, resource partitioning, observation, zone, hunting, foraging, coexist, organism, selection, character displacement, peter grant, rosemary grant, galapagos finches, trait, mutualism, commensalism, mycorrhizae, termite, obligate mutualism, barnacleFrom:crashcourseViews:304 55ratingsTime:11:30More inEducation

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Community Ecology: Feel the Love - Crash Course Ecology #4 - Video

Authors@Google Presents Gautam Mukunda "Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter" – Video

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Authors@Google Presents Gautam Mukunda "Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter"
Gautam Mukunda is an Assistant Professor in the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School. Before joining the business school he was the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology ERC Postdoctoral Fellow resident at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology #39;s Center for International Studies. He received his PhD from MIT in Political Science and an AB in Government from Harvard, magna cum laude. His research focuses on leadership, international relations, and the social and political implications of technological change. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and MIT #39;s Security Studies Program and Program on Emerging Technologies. Before graduate school he was a consultant with McKinsey Company, where he focused on the pharmaceutical sector. He is Founding Managing Director of The Two Rivers Group, a strategy consulting firm focusing on applying insights from academia to private and public sector problems. He is a member of the Board of Directors and Chair of the Mentorship Committee of The Upakar Foundation, a national non-profit devoted to providing college scholarships to underprivileged students of South Asian descent. He is a Paul Daisy Soros New American Fellow, an NSF IGERT Fellow, and a Next Generation Fellow of The American Assembly. He has published articles on leadership, military innovation, network-centric warfare, and the security and economic implications of synthetic biology in Security Studies, Parameters, Politics and the ...From:AtGoogleTalksViews:2 0ratingsTime:53:24More inNews Politics

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Authors@Google Presents Gautam Mukunda "Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter" - Video

Hanford Science Forum – Video

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Hanford Science Forum
Television program (one of a series) sponsored by General Electric Company for telecasting to residents of the Richland, Washington area. This interview with Dr. Richard F. Foster, manager of the Aquatic Biology Division at the Hanford plutonium plant, presents his research that the plant #39;s radioactive effluents have no effect on aquatic life in the Columbia River. Also featured is an interview with "science student of the week" Doyle Burke, senior at Columbia High School. General Electric Company and US Atomic Energy Commission at HanfordFrom:nuclearvaultViews:0 0ratingsTime:09:47More inEducation

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Hanford Science Forum - Video

Cell biology: Calcium 'accelerator' keeps cell power supply going

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ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2012) A team of scientists from Temple University School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania has moved another step closer to solving a decades-long mystery of how the all-important flow of calcium into the cell's power source, the mitochondria, is controlled.

By painstakingly shutting down the activity of 50 genes, one at a time, they have identified a protein, MCUR1, which hugs the inside of the mitochondrial membrane and is part of an elaborate mitochondrial channel pore system. MCUR1 acts as an accelerator to help regulate calcium coming into the mitochondria from the cell's large reservoir.

The results, appearing November 25, 2012 in an advance online issue of the journal Nature Cell Biology, may also point to new treatment opportunities. Understanding how to manipulate MCUR1 may help in the development of treatments for disease conditions involving excessive calcium in the cell, such as cardiovascular disease and stroke.

"Calcium is a key to regulate many fundamental processes in cells," said co-senior author Muniswamy Madesh, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Temple University School of Medicine and a member of Temple's Center for Translational Medicine. "Excessive calcium in the cell's mitochondria could lead to heart and neuronal mitochondrial dysfunction and cell death. This pathway could be contributing to disease conditions during ischemia/reperfusion injury and stroke, and this discovery opens up possible therapeutic interventions."

Maintaining calcium at an appropriate level is crucial for cells to work properly, and especially important in the mitochondria. Cells rely on mitochondria to generate usable energy in the form of the chemical ATP, which is necessary to carry out normal cellular and metabolic activities. ATP production in turn depends on calcium -- more specifically, charged calcium ions -- that can enter into the mitochondria from the cell's vast supply in the cytoplasm. Dr. Madesh, co-senior author Kevin Foskett, PhD, at the University of Pennsylvania, and their co-investigators recently described the role of a gatekeeper protein in maintaining a calcium "set point" under normal resting conditions in the mitochondria. But a long unanswered question remained: the details of how calcium entry into the mitochondria is controlled.

How MCUR1 Dictates Calcium Load

In the current study, Drs. Madesh and Foskett and their co-workers may have come closer to solving this puzzle. Dr. Madesh and his group sought to identify the genes involved in the flow of calcium into the mitochondria. They developed a way to use a technology called targeted RNA interference (RNAi) to screen 50 mitochondrial proteins, systematically testing whether eliminating the function of each of these genes individually altered the movement of calcium into the mitochondria. They found a mitochondrial inner membrane protein -- MCUR1 -- that regulates a calcium channel pore during active calcium uptake.

MCUR1 is part of a calcium channel pore called the uniporter, the existence of which has been known for some five decades. Recent studies identified two important pieces of the pore -- a subunit protein, MCU, and the gatekeeper protein, MICU1, to maintain calcium levels at a resting, set point. The researchers found that MCUR1 interacts with MCU to accelerate the movement of calcium into mitochondria when the cell's calcium level rapidly rises.

"MCUR1 is an essential third component of the uniporter complex," Dr. Madesh said. "In the absence of MCUR1, mitochondrial calcium uptake is markedly reduced, with adverse cellular consequences, including compromised cellular bioenergetics."

Without this accelerator, the mitochondria channel pore alone cannot take up calcium. When MCUR1 is physically attached to the pore, it is functional, and when it is not attached, it is much less active. "The regulator is always on, and its activity level increases when the extra-mitochondrial calcium levels increase. When there is a high calcium level, say during a disease state, the MCUR1 senses this and facilitates the channel activity, dumping calcium inside," Dr. Madesh explained.

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Cell biology: Calcium 'accelerator' keeps cell power supply going

Using computational biology for the annotation of proteins

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Research carried out at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid in collaboration with the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncologicas employed computational techniques to improve the characterization of proteins. The system they developed has allowed them to predict, for example, the relationship between two human proteins and telomeres, which led to their possible implication in cellular aging and the development of cancer; this awaits experimental verification.

Proteins are molecules that are formed by chains of amino acids and they play a fundamental role in all of life, given that they contain the coded information in genes; they, therefore, carry out numerous functions in an organism: immunological (antibodies), structural (they constitute the majority of cellular material), bioregulating (they form part of enzymes) and a long list of etceteras. In short, they regulate thousands of process that take place within all organisms, including inside the human organism, and they frequently do so by means of relationships they establish with other cells. "Analyzing and using this network of interactions is a very interesting task due to the large number of associations that exist and to the multiple forms in which one protein can influence the function of others," explains Professor Beatriz Garca, of UC3M's Computer Science department. "In such a complex biological scenario, determining the functional associations through experiments is very costly, so we have tried to apply computational tools to predict these functions and so orient experimentation," she points out. Thus, the idea is to use techniques from the field of Artificial Intelligence, specifically from the area of Machine Learning, to obtain useful results for Biology, as part of an emerging interdisciplinary field known as Biocomputing or Computational Biology.

In this context, this line of research goes further in the annotation of the function of proteins, that is, in the determination of which protein or which group of proteins performs which task within an organism. In short, these scientists have dealt with two specific problems: the prediction of functional associations between pairs of proteins in the bacteria Escherichia coli and the extension of biological pathways in humans. In addition, they offer conclusions regarding the interpretation of those predictions, which may help explain the function of the cellular processes that were studied. "In particular," states Beatriz Garca, "the predictions obtained regarding two human proteins stand out (E3 SUMO-protein ligase y E3 ubiquitin-protein ligase DTX1); these were previously related to the controlled degradation of certain proteins, and we can now propose a new function related to the stabilization of telomeres and, therefore, their possible implication in cellular aging and the development of cancer, which will require experimental verification."

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A video explaining the use of computational biology for the annotation of proteins. Credit: UC3M

In any case, much work remains to be done in the area of Biocomputation. "There are still so many unresolved biological problems that need computational solutions," assures Beatriz Garca, who highlights the relevance of this field, which is growing with the advances in new technologies; yet many computational challenges remain, such as the analysis of the new generation of sequencing. "This is an area that needs more trained professionals who can integrate Biology and Computer Science, in order to improve our knowledge of our organism at the molecular level and, finally, to facilitate the treatment of diseases," she concludes.

More information: Inference of Functional Relations in Predicted Protein Networks with a Machine Learning Approach, Beatriz Garca-Jimnez, David Juan, Iakes Ezkurdia, Eduardo Andres-Len, Alfonso Valencia, PLOS ONE 5(4): e9969. PLOS ONE 2010; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009969

Journal reference: PLoS ONE

Provided by Carlos III University of Madrid

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Using computational biology for the annotation of proteins

Biology Professor's Work Yields Largest Cactus Collection of Its Kind

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Newswise Last June, as Eric Ribbens and I perused his collection of his Opuntia fragilis probably the largest collection of its kind on the planet located near the Western Illinois University School of Agriculture's Farm in Macomb, the Department of Biological Sciences Professor and Fulbright Scholar told me about the unusual sex life of this rare and endangered prickly pear cactus.

"If you're going to go through the work of having sex, the goal is to maximize the genetic recombination. Yet, in plants, it's possible for pollen to move to the same plant. But for the Opuntia fragilis, these plants have some sort of a chemical recognition cue, and if they sense the pollen is from themselves, they shut it off and they won't let it fertilize the egg. We don't know exactly what is going on, but it turns out, in Illinois, at least and I suspect throughout the rest of the Midwest, although we haven't studied it yet it doesn't really matter if we take pollen from your flower or we take pollen from a flower nearby or pollen from a flower from a quarter-mile away, they all get shut off. So, somehow, the plant's mechanism is saying, 'All of this pollen is from me.' Or that pollen is a mechanism that's broken and not working right. We don't really know what is going on."

Based on his extensive research of the Opuntia fragilis species, Ribbens has provided strong evidence this species, in the Midwest at least, has forgotten how to have sex. It still tries now and then, though, he added with a smile.

With the help of students and fellow plant scientists, Ribbens has been closely studying this particular species of prickly pear cactus since 1995. He came to Western in 2000 and over the last 12 years, has continued his work researching the plant.

In 2010, he and Barbara Anderson (Burlington, IA), a former WIU biology graduate student, and Jeremy Fant, a plant scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden, published "Opuntia fragilis (Nuttall) Haworth in Illinois: pad dynamics and sexual reproduction," in Haseltonia, the peer-reviewed Yearbook of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America. Ribbens said this particular study article was the result of their investigation of the only known natural site of Opuntia fragilis in Illinois.

"About 10 years ago, I applied for and received a grant from the Illinois Endangered Species Protection Board to study Opuntia fragilis at the Lost Mounds site, a decommissioned munitions depot with a large Opuntia fragilis population covering about 100 acres," Ribbens explained. "The grant provided funding for a graduate student research assistantship to investigate the population status and fungal infections. So, my grad student, Barbara Anderson, and I designed a project to determine turnover in pad production and to study flowering in this species of prickly pear cactus. We built a matrix model of population/pad production, and Barb determined that although the plants flower, they do not produce seed. She also showed this was due to this self-incompatibility mechanism: if the plant senses that the pollen is from itself, it will prevent the pollen tube from growing down to find the ovule and fertilize the egg. Barb showed this happens for pollen from any plant. We also collaborated with Dr. Karyri Haven's research lab at the Chicago Botanic Garden to study the genetic diversity in this population," he said. "It was moderate."

Considering its aversion to reproduction, one wonders how the Opuntia fragilis which is sometimes referred to as the "brittle" variety continues on? Ribbens asserts the fragility of its pads hence, part of its eponymous scientific name, fragilis, and common name, "brittle" prickly pearprovides its survival mechanism.

"The pads break off easily, and this is actually the main way they move around. So imagine a deer walking through a site and kicking one, or a buffalo rolling in it and getting a couple of pads stuck to it. That's how we think it moved around the landscape," Ribbens explained. "Barbara and I spent about four years up in Jo Daviess County in Illinois examining the rate at which those pads break off."

The Making of a Midwestern Cactus Mission

For many, the thought of cactus plants can conjure desert scenes in drier, arid landscapes. But the Opuntia fragilis, which Ribbens began studying by accident, likes a chillier climate.

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Biology Professor's Work Yields Largest Cactus Collection of Its Kind

AQA Biology Unit 4 – Photosynthesis part 1 – Video

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AQA Biology Unit 4 - Photosynthesis part 1
Dappercast season 2 is here! (OMG) Coming atcha #39; with a trilogy of possibly more than three for photosynthesis. Point out innacuracies, ask me questions etc. Music: Karl Buhre - Stealing Horses Darren Korb - Slingers songFrom:Dapper CastsViews:0 0ratingsTime:05:17More inEducation

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AQA Biology Unit 4 - Photosynthesis part 1 - Video


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