Portal:Biology
Introduction


Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary information encoded in genes, which can be transmitted to future generations. Another major theme is evolution, which explains the unity and diversity of life. Energy processing is also important to life as it allows organisms to move, grow, and reproduce. Finally, all organisms are able to regulate their own internal environments.
Biologists are able to study life at multiple levels of organization, from the molecular biology of a cell to the anatomy and physiology of plants and animals, and evolution of populations. Hence, there are multiple subdisciplines within biology, each defined by the nature of their research questions and the tools that they use. Like other scientists, biologists use the scientific method to make observations, pose questions, generate hypotheses, perform experiments, and form conclusions about the world around them.
Life on Earth, which emerged more than 3.7 billion years ago, is immensely diverse. Biologists have sought to study and classify the various forms of life, from prokaryotic organisms such as archaea and bacteria to eukaryotic organisms such as protists, fungi, plants, and animals. These various organisms contribute to the biodiversity of an ecosystem, where they play specialized roles in the cycling of nutrients and energy through their biophysical environment. (Full article...)
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A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Viruses are found in almost every ecosystem on Earth and are the most numerous type of biological entity. Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1892 article describing a non-bacterial pathogen infecting tobacco plants and the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus by Martinus Beijerinck in 1898, more than 11,000 of the millions of virus species have been described in detail. The study of viruses is known as virology, a subspeciality of microbiology.
When infected, a host cell is often forced to rapidly produce thousands of copies of the original virus. When not inside an infected cell or in the process of infecting a cell, viruses exist in the form of independent viral particles, or virions, consisting of (i) genetic material, i.e., long molecules of DNA or RNA that encode the structure of the proteins by which the virus acts; (ii) a protein coat, the capsid, which surrounds and protects the genetic material; and in some cases (iii) an outside envelope of lipids. The shapes of these virus particles range from simple helical and icosahedral forms to more complex structures. Most virus species have virions too small to be seen with an optical microscope and are one-hundredth the size of most bacteria. (Full article...)Selected picture -

Chimaeras are cartilaginous fish in the order Chimaeriformes, known informally as ghost sharks, ratfish, spookfish, or rabbitfishes. They grow up to 150 cm (4.9 ft) in length, and have elongated, soft bodies, with a bulky head and a single gill-opening. For defense, most chimaeras have a venomous spine located in front of the dorsal fin. At one time a "diverse and abundant" group (based on the fossil record), their closest living relatives are sharks, though in evolutionary terms they branched off from sharks nearly 400 million years ago and have remained isolated ever since, typically confined to deep water.
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Ann Bishop (19 December 1899 – 7 May 1990) was a British biologist from Girton College at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the few female Fellows of the Royal Society. She was born in Manchester but stayed at Cambridge for the vast majority of her professional life. Her specialties were protozoology and parasitology; early work with ciliate parasites, including the one responsible for blackhead disease in the domesticated turkey, lay the groundwork for her later research. While working towards her doctorate, Bishop studied parasitic amoebae and examined potential chemotherapies for the treatment of amoebic diseases including amoebic dysentery.
Her best known work was a comprehensive study of Plasmodium, the malaria parasite, and investigation of various chemotherapies for the disease. Later she studied drug resistance in this parasite, research that proved valuable to the British military in World War II. She discovered the potential for cross-resistance in these parasites during that same period. Bishop also discovered the protozoan Pseudotrichomonas keilini and worked with Aedes aegypti, a malaria vector, as part of her research on the disease. Elected to the Royal Society in 1959, Bishop was the founder of the British Society for Parasitology and served on the World Health Organization's Malaria Committee. (Full article...)General images -
Did you know -
- ... that endemics along the wildlife of Morocco include more than six hundred species of vascular plants and a single species of bird?
- ... that an extract of Alchemilla diademata, a plant endemic to Lebanon, shows antimicrobial activity against Staphylococcus aureus?
- ... that more than 5,000 hen fleas were recorded from the nest of a coal tit?
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A complete list of scientific WikiProjects can be found here. See also Wikispecies, a Wikimedia project dedicated to classification of biological species.
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