The Open University ™s Dr Mark Sephton, who was part of an international team of scientists from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom who uncovered the remarkable new information, said: The mother of all mass extinction just got worse.
The findings are to appear in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) magazine, published today.
In our work we have found that at the time of the end-Permian extinction increased amounts of ultraviolet light filtered through the Earth ™s surface and caused damage to the DNA in plant spores. The results were abnormalities that prevented plant life from reproducing and a consequent collapse of terrestrial ecosystems, says Dr Sephton.
The cause of the increased intensity of ultraviolet light was a disruption in the Earth ™s ozone shield. Massive volcanic activity that was taking place in Siberia at this time forced chlorine and bromine containing gases into the stratosphere where they catalytically destroyed ultraviolet-absorbing ozone gases. It was only when volcanic activity subsided, that life on earth could begin to recover from its biggest ever catastrophe, he concluded.
Dr Sephton believes the results heed an important warning for today ™s society: We are bringing the effect of human activity on ozone depletion under control but the end-Permian example shows us that natural volcanic activity can cancel out all our good efforts.
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"The new autoinduction system is very convenient," Studier said. "Instead of spending much of the day monitoring the growth of many different cultures to get optimum conditions for producing proteins, we simply inoculate cultures late in the day, let autoinduction do the work for us, and collect our proteins the next morning. An added bonus is that we usually get much more protein."
Studier started his research on T7 ” a common bacteria-eating virus ” when he first joined Brookhaven Lab in 1964. "The T7 expression system came out of basic research," Studier said, "and the autoinduction system is also an application of basic knowledge. As so often happens, basic research led to useful applications in unexpected ways.
Studier's research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research within the Office of Science, and by the Protein Structure Initiative of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health as part of the New York Structural Genomics Research Consortium.
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