“Microorganisms are the best chemists on the planet,” declared Michael A. Fischbach, a chemist himself at the University of California, San Francisco.

For evidence, Dr. Fischbach points to the many lifesaving drugs that microorganisms produce. In 1928, for example, Alexander Fleming discovered that mold wafting into his lab produced a bacteria-killing chemical that he dubbed penicillin.

Later generations of scientists found drugmaking microorganisms in more exotic locales.

Continue reading “Mining for Antibiotics, Right Under Our Noses” →

Every second, people around the world drink more than 26,000 cups of coffee. And while some of them may care only about the taste, most use it as a way to deliver caffeine into their bloodstream. Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world.

Many of us get our caffeine fix in tea, and still others drink mate, brewed from the South American yerba mate plant. Cacao plants produce caffeine, too, meaning that you can get a mild dose from eating chocolate.

Caffeine may be a drug, but it’s not the product of some underworld chemistry lab; rather, it’s the result of millions of years of plant evolution. Despite our huge appetite for caffeine, however, scientists know little about how and why plants make it.

Continue reading “How Caffeine Evolved to Help Plants Survive and Help People Wake Up” →

In the history of biology, two little animals loom large.

In the early 1900s, scientists began studying Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. Research on these fast-breeding insects revealed that genes lie on chromosomes, which turned out to be true for other animals, including us. For more than a century, scientists have continued to glean clues from the lowly fly to other mysteries of biology, like why we sleep and how heart disease develops.

In the 1960s, another unassuming animal joined biology’s pantheon: a tiny worm called Caenorhabditis elegans.

Continue reading “Tiny, Vast Windows Into Human DNA” →