A tribute

Background info: It's a photo of an exhibit at the Natural History Museum. At the Ecology section, too!

India to launch census of its vanishing vultures

For Eco, RM

Source: SMH, 23 May 2005

India will launch a census of its vultures, a group of ornithologists, as the birds are vanishing rapidly due to a mystery virus and shrinking nesting sites.

The population of vultures, nature's scavenger and rodent controller, has fallen from tens of thousands just a decade ago to a few thousands also because of a veterinary drug found in cattle carcasses that the birds feed on, experts say.

"The vulture population in India has declined over 80 per cent over the last few years. We have decided to conduct a census in select sanctuaries and reserve forests in view of that," said VS Vijayan, director of the Madras-based Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History.

The census, which will be launched from the north-western state of Rajasthan and cover 20 national sanctuaries, will also study the feeding and flight patterns of the species, he said.

The dramatic drop in the population of the bird has created a crisis for the country's Parsi community, which leaves its dead on top of stone towers to be eaten by vultures as its religion forbids burial and cremation.

Parsis, or Zoroastrians, regard fire, earth and water as sacred and believe the vulture helps release the spirits of their ancestors.

K. Venkataraman of the National Biodiversity Authority said the vultures also were threatened by increasing air traffic over Indian cities.

"Increase in air traffic has caused more number of vulture deaths in recent years due to aeroplane hits," he said.

Alarms over reports of a sharp drop in population of tigers and wild elephants have prompted Indian authorities to order their censuses too.

NHM at Tring!

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/museum/tring/visitorinfo/visitorinfo.html

This is the place I'm talking Jac.

A fishy site

Check out the Fish Site at the Australian Museum. It includes a database of over 800 species of fish, not limited to Australasian waters, complete with references and links to scientific journals. Movies however, are only available for Australian species.

Budding itchyologist Xiyunicus, enjoy.

Two new species discovered

New Monkey Species Discovered in East Africa
John Roach
National Geographic News
May 19, 2005

New Rodent Discovered at Asian Food Market
James Owen
National Geographic News
May 16, 2005

Sqaure?! Much ado with nothing, hachoo and we all fall down

We're talking about tables?

tables right?

tables!

Bio lingo?!

Exams are drawing near

News flash

Avian influenza (H5N1) virus is possibly spreading among humans in Vietnam, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a document made publicon its Web site on Thursday (May 19).

Reporting on an international meeting held in the Philippines last week, WHO officials said worrying changes in the epidemiology of the virus had been seen between January and April this year in the north of Vietnam. "Investigators were not able to prove that human-to-human transmission had occurred, [but] they expressed concerns, which were shared by local clinicians," they said.

The document notes concerns that the latest H5N1 strains could be resistant to the antiviral oseltamivir, previously thought effective in fighting infection. It also discusses changes to the hemagglutinin (HA) protein that have been noted in 2005 H5N1 isolates, but had not been seen in 2004 sequence data. "The changes are consistent with the possibility that recently emerging H5N1 viruses may be more infectious for humans," the document's authors wrote.

"Recent viruses circulating in Northern Vietnam have lost an arginine residue in the mutibasic amino cluster at the proteolytic cleavage site of the HA protein," they warned. "The structure of the cleavage site is typical of highly pathogenic viruses." Epidemiological data also suggest the virus is "behaving" differently.

Kwok Yung Yuen, who heads the University of Hong Kong Microbiology Department—which operates a WHO designated laboratory—said, however, that epidemiological studies support the possibility that the virus pathogenicity has been somewhat reduced. "Fewer people are dying than before, and the disease is affecting a wider age group," he told The Scientist.

According to the WHO document, human bird flu clusters show a lag time between infections. This raises the possibility of incubation periods typical for human to human transmission of flu.

James Watson

We all know that the James Watson talk at the Dana Centre later today is fully booked. :-( But! Don't panic! You can see the live webcast here!!

Dana Center live webcast

All's not lost, but its not the same not being in the same room with the speaker. It's a bit like going to the Richard Dawkins/ Bill Bryson talk and ending up in the room nextdoor watching the even on a big TV.

As luck would have it

Right then, let me break the soliloquy:

Guess what arrived in the mail today: Armand Marie Leroi's Mutants On Genetic Variety and the Human Body.

It was from the Royal Society and some how it pays to fill in the feedback forms as they picked mine out for some sort of lucky draw for one of the many lectures I have been attending.

The next thing on my mind is to get Marvin to get Leroi to sign my book....since he'll be having lectures by him in time to come...hope he remembers.

I mean..what else do you do when the 1st book of a staff of your college lands in your lap. I shall make it my no1 book to read over summer.

As a biochemist, I shall endeavour to educate on the things that rock our world. Before you start foaming and gagging, I shall start with something benign and widely applicable:

HIV-1 elicits RNA silencing in human cells, but also contains a sequence that suppresses the process, researchers report in the May issue of Immunity.

"Nucleic acid based immunity in mammalian cells has been found before, but to date, there has been no single report of a natural small interfering RNA [siRNA] that is triggered by HIV in human cells," coauthor Kuan-Teh Jeangof the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Maryland told The Scientist. The virus' "counter strategy" described in the paper is also unprecedented, according to Jeang.

Coauthor Yamina Bennasser and her colleagues characterized a sequence in the HIV-1 genome that encodes a rare siRNA precursor, a short hairpin RNA that is processed by the Dicer (or by a Dicer-like) ribonuclease into small siRNAs. In addition, they found that the virus prevents RNA silencing through a suppressor present in its Tat protein, which interferes with Dicer's activity.

"It's a very nicely done and a very intriguing story," said Mario Stevenson of the University of Massachusetts, who did not participate in the study. "A number of groups, including ours, have looked at the question of whether HIV encodes RNAs that can form siRNAs. Jeang's group was able to reveal that it does before anyone else."

But John Rossi of City of Hope Beckman Research Institute in Duarte, Calif., who was not involved in the research, questioned the physiological relevance of the results. "It doesn't make much sense that Dicer, a cytoplasmic enzyme, would be inhibited by Tat, which is exclusively a nuclear enzyme," Rossi told The Scientist. "And the 19 base-pair hairpins they describe are not substrates for Dicer." Rossi said that "dumping tons of Tat into the cells" can lead to "all sorts of nonspecific effects."

Stevenson, however, is not concerned by those questions. "We are learning of new substrates for Dicer all the time, and some groups have shown that RNA silencing can also be achieved in the nucleus, not only in the cytoplasm. The rules by which RNA interfering machinery works are continually being tweaked and modified as we understand more about the process," he said.

What did surprise Stevenson is the idea that HIV encodes siRNA and avoids being inactivated by it by encoding a suppressor. "It seems an incredible expenditure of effort," he said, but added, "viruses will not always subscribe to human logic."

Stevenson is more interested in whether shRNAs can be effectively used against HIV as a suppressor mechanism. "If Jeang's results prove to be right, then the shRNAs therapeutic approaches [which expresses a HIV specific shRNA to be processed by Dicer into an antiviral form] may not be optimal."

Jeang welcomed the debate. "What is science without criticism?" he asked. "The excitement that drives me to this work, other than the fact that it comments on an aspect of nucleic acid immunology, is that the sequence that we have characterized doesn't change. It's constantly eliciting siRNAs against the virus, forcing the virus to develop a completely new mechanism. This is telling us that there is a region in the virus' genome that, because of functional constraints, cannot mutate."

According to Jeang, HIV researchers' "holy grail" is the ability to find regions in the HIV genome that cannot mutate, and the sequence that he and colleagues have characterized seems to be one such region that cannot change for functional reasons.

Enjoy! Quote of the day: 'Viruses will not always subscribe to human logic'...of course not..they subscribe to viral logic....u don't need to be a biochemist to realise that.

Darwin Centre Live

Hey folks, post more! Seems like stuff I post only benefit ecologists, resource managers and parasitologists. Bah. This makes it boring for the micro-stuff people.

Anyway, from the Natural History Museum's online archive:

The Control of Schistosomiasis in Africa - Russel Stothard

"Scientists from the Natural History Museum have been involved in schistosome-related studies for nearly four decades. A new initiative funded by the Gates Foundation hopes to benefit child health in tropical African regions by control of schistosomiasis, a serious and long-term illness caused by parasitic flatworms. Museum scientist Russell Stothard will report on recent activities in Uganda and issues concerning this important water-borne disease."

This is also the guy who's gonna give the POLS students the seminar/keynote lecture tomorrow. He did his PhD at Imperial, and was a Field Project Coordinator at the College for a few years.

At the main Darwin Centre Live archive page, there's a whole lot of other videos. It's got a section on parasites too, and in the miscellaneous section you might find videos about DNA and genes and etc.

Addendum: Mycologists (oh yeah, should get Xiao in here) will be delighted to find a few clips on fungi too.

Bio birthday

Happy birthday, Wing-kit-kun.

Four major things happened today:

1. Singaporean biologists' lunch - all three generations unite!
2. Wing-kit's birthday celebration with the sweet choc cake in SAF
3. Wing-kit being temporarily exiled to the library while we signed his card
4. Cinema trip to watch The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (side note: avoid Kensington Odeon; they only give a miserable discount of 20p for students!)

Edit: Sorry, I left out a mention of Wink's brown chocolatey balls. And also the little visit to the Kensington pet shop, and how streamlined gOldfish will chase the big blob-headed fat ones if placed in the same tank.

Aging Sewer Systems Fouling Great Lakes

For Eco, RM, POLS

Link to related article and more. Also mentions Cryptosporidium and others. ;)

Aging Sewer Systems Fouling Great Lakes
By JOHN FLESHER, Associated Press Writer
Tue May 17,10:00 PM ET

Sewage is fouling the Great Lakes [in the US] and other waters in the region because many municipal waste treatment systems are failing to stop overflows, environmental groups said in a report Tuesday.

Most municipal systems in six Great Lakes states that combine stormwater with domestic and industrial sewage haven't met minimum federal standards for preventing such discharges, nor have they received approval for long-term plans to control overflows, the report said.

The situation poses a health hazard that could get worse under Bush administration proposals to slash funding for wastewater system upgrades and to let sewage plants skip some stages of treatment during heavy rains or melting snow, environmentalists said.

Together, they have 358 municipalities with federal permits for combined sewers, which use the same collection system for moving stormwater and raw sewage to treatment plants. When the systems overflow during storms, contaminated water is dumped into lakes, rivers and oceans - about 850 billion gallons nationwide each year.

The pollution ranges from bacteria, viruses and parasites to metals such as mercury and lead, said Cheryl Nenn of the group Friends of Milwaukee's Rivers.

The Great Lakes region has nearly half of the nation's 828 combined sewage systems, which tend to be located in older cities. Most newer systems keep sewage and stormwater separate.

The federal Clean Water Act required communities with combined sewers to take nine steps by 1997, including upgrading maintenance and operations, improving storage capacity and doing better at notifying the public about overflows.

Also required were long-term plans for reducing overflows by doing things such as upgrading infrastructure to separate collection systems.

About 62 percent of the communities have failed to take the nine steps, which the report describes as minimum efforts. About 54 percent haven't secured state approval of long-term plans and 22 percent have yet to submit plans to their states, the report said.

Lack of money is the biggest reason cities haven't moved more quickly on sewer upgrades, said Joe Fivas, transportation and environmental affairs manager for the Michigan Municipal League.

In a telephone news conference, environmentalists said some of the required steps wouldn't be very costly. But they criticized the Bush administration's proposal to cut a federal loan program for upgrading treatment plants from $1.09 billion this year to $730 million in fiscal 2006.

They also urged the EPA not to give municipalities greater freedom to blend fully and partially treated sewage during peak flow periods. The agency has been considering a blending policy since 2003 but has made no decision, EPA spokesman Dale Kemery said.

U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak (news, bio, voting record), D-Menominee, Mich., will offer an amendment to a spending bill this week that would block the EPA from allowing blending except during extreme weather conditions, a spokeswoman said.

As Honorary Member

As Honorary member,

I just like to extend my warm welcome to all Biologists.

Hahaha

Why did the Jame Watson talk have to sell out.....!!!

Before we start

You know I'm the serious sort. I like to create rules, but I don't really like to follow them. Still, rules are a convenient thing to have. Especially in the labs.

Here are the guidelines for writing in this blog:

Guideline #1 - It must be about biology (easy enough? If you're creative enough you could even turn a discussion of how a bicycle's wheels work into something bio-ish).

Guideline #2 - Or it could be about biologists. Like what Dr Lamb had for dinner last night (no offense meant; Dr Lamb is a such a nice person).

Guideline #3 - One-liners and essays are both welcomed. Pictures will be revered but please don't overpost those... soon the reverence will turn into lag.

Guideline #4 - Biologists don't really need to know how to count properly. Hence numbers don't really matter, 'cept in the matters of population ecology. 100 quokkas and 101 quokkas left in the wild does make a lot of difference (who knows - that 101st one might be asexual).

Guideline #4 - If you don't know what a quokka is, you deserve to be shot.

Guideline #5 - All new contributors to this cooperative must first pass the entrance exam, which does not include any questions on quokkas. It might or might not include how much a panini in the SAFCafe costs, however. That is a mark of a true Imperial biologist.

Blistering Barnacles

The background of barnacles - they were by me. :-) I took the pic when I was on my school Bio field trip to Dorset. Oh, Dorset. How fun that was.

Bio X

Lookie here, I'm writing something in the Bio Blog - The Biological Testament as named by me. "The Boonies" (like the 1985 movie, "The Goonies") would've been more of a fun title, but I guess we'll just settle for The Biological Testament. Anywhoo, its still a title created by me.

So, Jac, could you stick up the malaria photo's? Perhaps a few more of my stick insects?

Test

Wruffers. Meow. Squawk. Gobble. Snort. Moo. Screech. ROAR. Squeak.

*gribbit*