Questions tagged [history]
Questions relating to how the field of biology has developed over time.
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How to understand restriction mapping a quarter of a century later?
Today, biology is virtually all based on massively parallel sequencing, long-strand sequencing, and metagenomic; looking back at old restriction mapping is not straightforward (at least for me).
For ...
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About tomatoes pigments, why red tomatoes rather than yellow ones
How the first tomatoes (yellow) that arrived in Europe turned from yellow to red ?
I know the yellow pigment is xantophylle and the red one is lycopene, but my question is, was it an adaptation of the ...
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How was Campbell's Model of phage lambda integration into E. coli definitively proven?
In a series of seminal papers summarized in Annual Review in Genetics (2007) 41 1–11, Allan Campbell proposed a model that assumed phage lambda integration in its host (E. coli) genome. This is in ...
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Where does Actino- come from in the genus Actinomycetota?
This comment under Bacteria trapped in crystal inclusions found 'alive' after 50,000 years - what were they eating all that time? links to Quintana, Badillo ann Maldonado (2013) ...
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Who demonstrated that phage lamba is integrated into the host chromosome?
In the 1950s, the Lederbergs (Esther and Joshua) demonstrated the presence of phage lamba in Escherichia coli K-12.
But who demonstrated that this virus is integrated into the host's genome? Is there ...
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What is important in the Luria-Latarjet effect?
In the seminal paper
Luria, S.E. and Latarjet, R. (1964) “Ultraviolet irradiation of
bacteriophage during intracellular growth”. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States ...
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Preserving a sample for mtDNA and nuclear DNA analysis
Imagine a person in the early half of the 20th century (1900 to 1950) took some kind of sample(s) from a living human body using any technology of the era. They then stored it using any technology ...
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Who discovered that phage phiX174 has a single-stranded genome?
I have recently read that Erwin Chargaff has discovered that the genome of phage phiX174 (ϕχ174) is single-stranded. However I could not find the paper reporting this discovery.
Is there a link to the ...
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What were fed to the rodents in Calhoun's experiments?
From, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/)(https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/1962-...
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Graph of new species discovered per year
I'm looking for historical data on the number of new species described each year.
I found the RetroSOS report (page 3), which provides a time series for 2000–2009:
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Why were there relatively fewer papers about cell fusion before the 1950s?
While working on my cell fusion technology report, I saw PubMed's cell fusion graph of results by year. There have been studies or research since the early 1900s, but until the 1950s, there were no ...
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Can a dead fish be made to twitch via electrostimulation?
Galvani in the 1700s famously showed that a dead frog can be made to twitch by electric stimulation. The hind legs are particularly susceptible. Salt helps in the activation, as shown in these videos:
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Giant inflatable laboratory in the jungle. How to find it?
When I was a child (circa year 2000), I watched a documentary (in English) about some biologists doing research about jungle (perhaps Amazon). The biologists lived in a base which was a huge ...
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What are the definition of pecking order? [closed]
Pecking order is the phenomenon that dominating individual usually eat first. It is commonly observed in animals. In animals, it is often due to the fact that the strong individual won the fights for ...
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How to decipher references in natural history works of the late Renaissance and early Modernity?
Old botany books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (and maybe also some later ones) enumerating lists of species used to give references to their sources as abbreviations consisting of one or few ...
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