EurekAlert! News by Subject: Biology - News by Subject: Biology

Biology

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 29-Jun-2025 09:10 ET (29-Jun-2025 13:10 GMT/UTC)

Exposure to stress during early pregnancy affects offspring into adulthood

Deutsches Primatenzentrum (DPZ)/German Primate Center
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Maternal stress hormone levels during early pregnancy can have a lasting effect on the stress system of the offspring. The results of a long-term study on wild Assamese macaques in Thailand indicate that maternal stress in the first half of pregnancy is particularly relevant. Elevated stress hormones later during pregnancy or after birth did not have the same effects. The long-term study conducted by the University of Göttingen and the German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research provides important insights into the influence of early life stages on the development of the stress system under natural environmental conditions.

GenEditScan: novel k-mer analysis tool based on next-generation sequencing for foreign DNA detection in genome-edited products

National Agriculture and Food Research Organization
Reports and Proceedings

The National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) has developed GenEditScan, a simple k-mer analysis tool and is available for free on GitHub website. k-mer analysis is used for detecting foreign DNA in genome-edited crops using next-generation sequencers. The publication of GenEditScan is expected to accelerate the research on genome-edited crops.

Funder: Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries

Dolphins use a 'fat taste' system to get their mother’s milk

Hokkaido University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Juvenile dolphins were found to have specialized receptors for fatty acids on their tongues, offering new insights into their growth and feeding habits.

Journal: Marine Mammal Science
Funder: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan Science Society, Kyoto University, Hokkaido University

Seeing the unseen: New method reveals ’hyperaccessible’ window in freshly replicated DNA

Gladstone Institutes
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In a new study published in the journal Cell, a team from Gladstone Institutes has unearthed new findings about what happens during the minutes and hours after a cell divides, expanding our understanding of human biology—and potentially leading to better medicines.

Journal: Cell

UF engineers develop microfluidic protocol to extract and purify DNA

University of Florida
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A team from the University of Florida developed a microfluidic device for DNA purification that could speed up analysis of laboratory samples and match or exceed the purity of existing methods.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Building sentence structure may be language-specific

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS Biology, scientists from the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders Institute and Radboud University in Nijmegen recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to English, sentence processing in Dutch was based on a strategy for predicting what comes next rather than a ‘wait-and-see’ approach, showing that strategies may differ across languages.

Journal: PLOS Biology

Human papillomavirus infection kinetics revealed in new longitudinal study

PLOS
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Non-persistent human papillomavirus (HPV) infections are characterized by a sharp increase in viral load followed by a long plateau, according to a study published January 21^st in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Samuel Alizon of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France, and colleagues.

Journal: PLOS Biology