
As part of a National Science Foundation grant program to examine cutting edge ways to make nature work for us, a team of scientists at Iowa State University have been awarded $2 million to unravel how some plants and algae can make hydrocarbons and discover if the genes that govern that process might be isolated.
“These plants are capturing solar energy and creating something that’s chemically identical to petroleum,” said Jackie Shanks, Iowa State’s Manley R. Hoppe Professor of Chemical Engineering, in a statement.
After two weeks of a strict algae-only diet, a one-inch, green sea slug species (Elysia chlorotica) was somehow able to incorporate the plants chloroplasts (the cell-like organelles that trap solar energy and convert it to sugar), and then live out the rest of their single-year lives without eating.

Harvard Medical School Professor Greg Church and Research Fellow Michael Jewett extracted ribosomes from E. coli bacteria, processed them, and then made new ones from the molecules.
There’s been a seven- to eight-fold increase of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) cases in California since 1990.
I’ve suspected that the rise in diagnoses of ASD is linked to many factors, one of them better detection. You, too? Not so, says a new study.
“It’s time to start looking for the environmental culprits responsible for the remarkable increase in the rate of autism in California…We’re looking at the possible effects of metals, pesticides and infectious agents on neurodevelopment,” said researcher Irva Hertz-Piccoto.
The findings of this fascinating study were published this week in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences. So without further ado, here’s how they brought the long dead mice back to life.
It was a weird and improbable shotgun wedding of genetic material — one conducted by your drunk uncle Larry in a brothel on the outskirts of Las Vegas. One in which researchers successfully combined enzymes from a bacteria that normally resides in a cow’s gut with the genes of the leaves and stalk of a corn plant — and one in which the offspring from that marriage is a corn plant that can digest itself into the components needed to make ethanol.

Certainly, anything that can digest itself warrants a closer look — and now a company in Kansas has licensed that proprietary corn offspring, dubbed Spartan Corn III (it even sounds like a name your drunk uncle Larry would approve of), for the ultimate consummation of the marriage in a baptism of commercialization.
In the June 2008 issue of the journal Nature Reviews Genetics, internationally renowned biofuels researcher Mariam Sticklen proposes that future production of cellulosic biofuels will be made infinitely more efficient and affordable through genetic modification of cellulosic feedstocks such as cereal grains and perennial grasses. Citing the impossibility of fueling the world on starch-based ethanol, such as that from corn, Sticklen argues that cellulosic biofuels are the only viable option for future commercial production.
Subscribe to our RSS feed or newsletter