Seasonal seaweed highlights chemical diversity
Friday, March 28, 2014 - 09:00
in Biology & Nature
The well-known 'nature versus nurture' debate is very familiar to psychologists but has equal importance in molecular biology. Although most research into biological variation focuses on genetic differences among organisms, environmental factors can also cause great chemical diversity within the same species. Jun Kikuchi from the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science and Kengo Ito from Yokohama City University have now shown how the chemical components of seaweed change over the seasons.