Wildlife researchers are being warned that radio-tracking could be affecting the animals they are studying. According to new research published today in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, fitting radio-collars to water voles was associated with a "dramatic shift" in the sex ratio of the animals' offspring, casting doubt on the assumption that radio-tracking does not fundamentally affect the biology of radio-collared water voles.

The first experimental evidence that birds can be deceived by camouflage in the same way that humans are deceived, is published today in Nature [3 March 2005].

The idea that bold contrasting colours help to break-up the body's outline was rapidly adopted by many armies as long ago as the First World War. And in biology this idea of 'disruptive colouration' has long been used to explain how insects such as moths conceal themselves from predators, shaping the evolution of protective coloration in insects.

In the March 3 issue of Nature, Johns Hopkins researchers report that two proteins best known for very different activities actually come together to turn the liver into a sugar-producing factory when food is scarce. Because the liver's production of sugar is a damaging problem in people with diabetes, the proteins' interaction might be a target for future drugs to fight the disease, the researchers say.

Under normal circumstances, the liver's production of sugar is a back-up plan that enables survival during food shortages; the brain and certain other critical organs rely on sugar -- specifically glucose -- for the energy to function. In people with diabetes, however, the liver doesn't sense the incoming calories, and it keeps making glucose when it shouldn't.

The researchers discovered that, in fasting mice, the liver's production of sugar kicked into high gear because amounts and activities of the two proteins, called sirtuin1 and PGC1-alpha, increased when dietary calories weren't available. Once mice were fed, levels of the two proteins went down and sugar production ceased.

Phages, viruses that infect bacteria, are the most abundant microbes in the world. A major limitation to studying these viruses is the difficulty of cultivating the appropriate prokaryotic hosts. One way around this limitation is to directly clone and sequence shotgun libraries of uncultured viral communities (i.e., metagenomic analyses). PHACCS (http://phage.sdsu.edu/phaccs), Phage Communities from Contig Spectrum, is an online bioinformatic tool to assess the biodiversity of uncultured viral communities. PHACCS uses the contig spectrum from shotgun DNA sequence assemblies to mathematically model the structure of viral communities and make predictions about diversity.

High-throughput methods identify an overwhelming number of protein-protein interactions. However, the limited accuracy of these methods results in the false identification of many spurious interactions. Accordingly, the resulting interactions are regarded as hypothetical and computational methods are needed to increase their confidence. Several methods have recently been suggested for this purpose including co-expression as a confidence measure for interacting proteins, but their performance is still quite poor.