Cells, the fundamental building blocks of all living organisms, stick to other cells via a process called cell adhesion. For multicellular organisms like ourselves, cell adhesion plays a crucial role in our immune response, in wound healing and cancer development, and it prevents us from degrading into a pool of individual cells. The last twenty years of experiments and theory have shown that cell adhesion may be accurately described by a model…

The direction of movement of a microbe directly depends on the curvature of its environment – this is the key finding of a recent publication in the journal PNAS with participation of the universities of Loughborough, Düsseldorf and Bayreuth, as well as the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPIDS) in Göttingen. The researchers investigated the navigation of a model microbe, a small self-propelling microalga, in confined…

Ecosystems provide a wide range of services to people. These services depend on basic ecosystem functions, which are shaped by natural conditions like climate, the mix of species and by human intervention. A research team including the University of Göttingen has identified three key indicators that describe the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems: the capacity to maximise primary productivity; the efficiency of using water; and the efficiency…

The Moon’s polar regions are home to craters and other depressions that never receive sunlight. Today, a group of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany presents the highest-resolution images to date covering 17 such craters in the journal Nature Communications. Craters of this type could contain frozen water, making them attractive targets for future lunar missions, and the researchers focused…

It was thought that the survival of animal species over a geologically long period of time without sexual reproduction would be very unlikely, if not impossible. However, an international research team of zoologists and evolutionary biologists at the Universities of Cologne and Göttingen, as well as Universities in Lausanne (Switzerland) and Montpelier (France), has now demonstrated for the first time that animals can reproduce successfully…

The global decline of pollinators threatens the reproductive success of 90 per cent of all wild plants globally and the yield of 85 per cent of the world’s most important crops. Pollinators – mainly bees and other insects – contribute to 35 per cent of the world's food production. The service provided by pollinators is particularly important for securing food produced by the more than two billion small farmers worldwide. An agroecologist at the U…

Wood scientists at the University of Göttingen, together with the Swiss company Archroma, a global specialty chemicals company, have developed a new method for turning affordable and ecologically friendly wood from European forests into high-quality, fire-resistant construction timber. Until now, European softwood and hardwood could either be structurally modified to have physical and biological properties similar to tropical hardwood, or it…

Mitochondria are organelles within our cells that generate the majority of chemical energy required to sustain life. They contain a dedicated genome with a special set of genes that need to be expressed to fulfill their function. An important step in mitochondrial gene expression is RNA processing, during which the premature RNA is cut into functional entities by specialized RNA-cutting enzymes. Defects in this process lead to severe human…

Phosphorus is an essential plant nutrient that is becoming increasingly scarce around the world. This means the fertiliser has to be used as efficiently as possible and any loss of nutrients due to leaching and erosion must be minimised. This is challenging for potato farmers, as potatoes need a lot of phosphorus due to their weak root systems. A research team from the University of Göttingen has investigated how a limited phosphorus supply…

Urbanization is one of the most drastic forms of land-use change, and its negative consequences on biodiversity have been studied extensively in temperate countries such as Germany. However, less research has been conducted in tropical regions from the Global South, where most of the ongoing and future urbanization hotspots are located, and little is known about its effects on agricultural biodiversity and associated ecosystems. A research team…