Article reviewed by Tristan Long, PhD from Wilfrid Laurier University. Stay up to date on the latest science with Brush Up Summaries. These organisms are also successful models because of their ...

You wouldn't know by looking at Escherichia coli that it's kind of a big deal. The non-descript, pill-shaped cell is why we understand fundamental life processes (think DNA replication and ...

Nature uses a common framework when building organisms as different as yeast, worms, fruit flies, mice, and humans. This makes it possible for scientists to learn about how our own genes work by ...

In 2006, Wojciech Pisula snuck behind a gas station in Warsaw, Poland to catch a rat. A psychologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Pisula had been sending lab rats through mazes for more than a ...

How do living organisms that lack a brain or nerve cells make decisions? In a new study published in May 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ...

A wide variety of animals have been previously used in animal testing, including mice, flies, and monkeys. A particularly useful model organism is Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit ...

Genes can be turned on and off as needed to adapt to environmental changes. But how do the different molecules involved interact with each other? Scientists present a candidate mathematical model for ...

Escherichia coli is a rod-shaped (bacillus) Gram-negative bacterium that is frequently used as a model organism. Factors such as its ability to grow fast using cheap media and availability of ...