Targeted conservation actions are essential to prevent wildlife extinctions, but more efforts are needed to fully recover biodiversity, according to a study published March 18^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Ashley Simkins of the University of Cambridge, UK and colleagues.

It’s time for researchers to reconsider the current paradigm of cancer as a genetic disease, argued Sui Huang from the Institute for Systems Biology, USA, and colleagues in a new essay published March 18^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

A major review of over 67,000 animal species has found that while the natural world continues to face a biodiversity crisis, targeted conservation efforts are helping bring many species back from the brink of extinction.

Livestock agriculture is bearing the cost of extreme weather events. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explores how heat stress affects U.S. dairy production, finding that high heat and humidity lead to a 1% decline in annual milk yield. Small farms are hit harder than large farms, which may be able to mitigate some of the effects through management strategies.

Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are non-coding RNA molecules whose role in gene regulation and their association with certain diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or colorectal cancer, has only recently become known. The Fish Genetics Research Group of the Department of Genetics at ELTE has investigated in detail the temporal expression of snoRNAs in the genome of zebrafish, an important genetic model organism, and has also created an online database (snoDanio) for their interactive visualization.