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How a novel class of sulfonamides potently blocks malaria transmission

Drugs to treat malaria symptoms and insecticides to kill malaria-spreading mosquitoes have improved in recent decades, but the parasite and the mosquitoes are evolving to become resistant to these strategies.

The Baum laboratory along with colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, previously identified a new class of potent antimalarial compounds, belonging to a family of sulfonamides. These compounds kill the parasite only when it is in a specific sexual phase of its life cycle, rapidly stopping it from being able to infect a mosquito and, therefore, preventing any subsequent human infection.

In their new Disease Models & Mechanisms article, Baum and colleagues explored exactly how these compounds work, which is an essential step before the compounds can be developed for testing in patients.

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phys.org

Predatory bacteria provide hope for chlorine-free drinking water

In a unique study carried out in drinking water pipes in Sweden, researchers from Lund University and the local water company tested what wo

In a unique study carried out in drinking water pipes in Sweden, researchers from Lund University and the local water company tested what would happen if chlorine was omitted from drinking water. The result? An increase in bacteria, of course, but after a while something surprising happened: a harmless predatory bacteria grew in numbers and ate most of the other bacteria. The study suggests that chlorine is not always needed if the filtration is efficient—and that predatory bacteria could perhaps be used to purify water in the future. Just as human intestines contain a rich bacterial flora, many types of bacteria thrive in our drinking water and the pipes that transport them. On the inside of pipe walls is a thin, slippery coating, called a biofilm, which protects and supports bacteria. These bacteria have adapted to life in the presence of chlorine, which otherwise has the primary task to kill bacteria, particularity bacteria that can make humans sick.

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NYC Subway Bacterial Petri Dish Art by Craig Ward

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BRAINLESS BOX JELLIES CAN LEARN BY EXPERIENCE

Mangrove box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) is a small species of box jellyfish, native to the Caribbean Sea and the Central Indo-Pacific, presenting a simple nervous system. But despite tiny, researchers have demonstrated present the ability to learn by association. Although has no central brain, and being the size of the finger-tip, this box jelly can be trained to associate the sensation of bumping into something with a visual cue, and to use the information to avoid future collisions.

In the wild, the Mangrove box jellyfish forage for tiny crustaceans between the roots of mangroves. To mimic this environment, researchers placed the box jellies in cylindrical tanks that had either black and white or grey and white vertical stripes on the walls. To the jellyfish, the dark stripes looked like mangrove roots in either clear or murky water. In the ‘murky water’ tanks, the jellyfish bumped into the wall because their visual system couldn’t detect the grey stripes very clearly. But after a few minutes, they learnt to adjust their behaviour, pulsing rapidly to swim away from the wall when they got too close, this state learning is based on the combination of visual and mechanical stimuli in simple animals with no brain.

The learning process, in difference with vertebrate animals, doesnt occurs in a central neuronal organs, but instead in a small organs named rhopalial nervous system, which act as learning center, in which the jelly combines visual and mechanical stimuli during operant conditioning.

Main image: An adult specimen of the box jellyfish T. cystophora., showing where is located one of the four sensory structures named rhopalia, which includes two lens eyes. Each rhopalium also contains a visual information processing center.

Reference (Open Access): Bielecki et al., 2023. Associative learning in the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora. Current Biology.

Did we kill them?

Looking at what concentrations my antibiotics killed resistant Staphylococcus bacteria.

Higher antibiotic concentrations are on the right side, where there is clear liquid with no bacteria growth. It works!

gorgeous mold in a petri dish, Sporothrix schenckii

lil chemistry moodboard for motivation 🧪🥼

Scientists make 'disturbing' find on remote island: plastic rocks

A 'plastic rock' found by Brazilian scientists on Trindade Island,one of the most remote places on the planet.

There are few places on Earth as isolated as Trindade island, a volcanic outcrop a three- to four-day boat trip off the coast of Brazil.

So geologist Fernanda Avelar Santos was startled to find an unsettling sign of human impact on the otherwise untouched landscape: rocks formed from the glut of plastic pollution floating in the ocean.

Santos first found the plastic rocks in 2019, when she traveled to the island to research her doctoral thesis on a completely different topic—landslides, erosion and other “geological risks.”

She was working near a protected nature reserve known as Turtle Beach, the world’s largest breeding ground for the endangered green turtle, when she came across a large outcrop of the peculiar-looking blue-green rocks.

Intrigued, she took some back to her lab after her two-month expedition.

Analyzing them, she and her team identified the specimens as a new kind of geological formation, merging the materials and processes the Earth has used to form rocks for billions of years with a new ingredient: plastic trash.

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