Dr. Kevin Foster, from the University of Oxford, visited the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University last week to talk about competition and sociability among a variety of bacteria, some of which call our guts home. Using humorous descriptions of...
There is a mature literature on evolution and aging intended to explain how, despite selection for the morphological, metabolic, physiological, and behavioral prerequisites for survival and procreation, with the passage of time bodies deteriorate ultimately resulting...
Clinical organ transplantation is now a large medical enterprise, with more than 29,000 organ transplants performed in 2014 in the United States alone (https://www.unos.org/data/transplant-trends/#transplants_by_organ_type+year+2014). Nevertheless, the number of organ...
After posting my last commentary on the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa, I listened to the netcast, This Week in Virology (www.twiv.tv), for September 14, 2014. TWiV sessions, hosted by Vincent Racaniello, a well-known virologist at Columbia University, are...
A prion is a protein that can adopt a conformation other than the ‘standard’ functional conformation and this alternative conformation favors self-association. The aggregation-associated conformation can then be imposed on additional copies of the protein in the...