A team of researchers investigating the effects of oxytocin, a peptide produced by the brain that regulates social behavior, has found that it can prevent detrimental cardiac responses in adult female animals exposed to social isolation. The findings may provide further insight into how these mechanisms affect humans.

In the May 15th issue of Genes & Development, an international collaboration of researchers, led by Dr. Yijun Qi (National Institute of Biological Sciences, China), report on their discovery of microRNAs in the unicellular green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This is the first finding of microRNAs in a unicellular organism.

US and Mexican conservation efforts may have boosted the number of marine turtles visiting UK waters, according to University of Exeter biologists.

Unfed and engorged tick. Sex makes you fat. If you're a female tick, that is.

Ultraviolet fluorescence microscopy image of a stigma of an arabidopsis plant that has been genetically modified to resist self-pollination. The left side was self-pollinated and the right side pollinated from another variety, and pollen tubes form only on the cross-pollinated side. Credit: Nasrallah Lab Some plants need a partner to reproduce. Pollen from one plant pollinates the stigma of another, and a seed is formed. But other plants can self-pollinate, a handy survival mechanism for a lonely plant.

A researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine has helped confirm the reliability of a new test for liver disease that is ushering in the long-promised era of personalized medicine based on each individual's genetic makeup.

The ability of HIV-1 to develop high levels of genetic diversity and acquire mutations to escape immune pressures contributes to our difficulties in producing a vaccine. David Nickle et al present here an efficient algorithm to develop vaccines that cope with the diversity of HIV or other variable pathogens.