Rise in mass die-offs seen among birds, fish and marine invertebrates

Date:

January 12, 2015

Source:

University of California - Berkeley

Summary:

An analysis of 727 studies reveals that there have been more instances of rapid, catastrophic animal die-offs over the past 75 years. These mass kills appear to have hit birds, fish and marine invertebrates harder than other species.

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Scientists Decipher What’s Behind A Marine Creature’s Bright Green Fluorescent Glow

July 3, 2014

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

Fish-like animal emanates bright and dim versions of fluorescent light, a phenomenon that could help guide human biotechnological applications

Pushing closer to understanding the mechanisms behind the mysterious glow of light produced naturally by certain animals, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have deciphered the structural components related to fluorescence brightness in a primitive sea creature.

In a study published in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal of the Nature Publishing Group, Dimitri Deheyn and his colleagues at Scripps Oceanography, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have conducted the most detailed examination of green fluorescent proteins (GFPs) in lancelets, marine invertebrates also known as “amphioxus.” The fish-shaped animals, which spend much of their time in shallow coastal regions burrowed in sand except for their heads, offer unique insights on natural fluorescence since individual specimens can emit both very bright and much dimmer versions of the light, a rare capability in the animal kingdom.

The study carries implications for a variety of industries looking to maximize brightness of natural fluorescence—the process of transformation of blue “excitation” light into green “emission” light—including applications in biotechnology such as adapting fluorescence for biomedical protein tracers and for tracking the expression of specific genes in the human body.

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