Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Many metabolic diseases show clear differences in how they manifest between males and females. While gonadal steroid hormones have been suggested as the underlying cause, the gut microbiome could also play a critical role. A new study investigated how the makeup and function of the gut microbiome is related to sex, menopausal status, and circulating gonadal steroids in humans. Important differences in gut microbiota composition and functionality were found between (a) pre-menopausal women and (b) men and post-menopausal women. But obesity overrode those differences. In addition, microbiome profiles were associated with certain gonadal steroids, particularly circulating testosterone and serum progesterone. Interestingly, microbiome signatures could be transferred from human donors to microbiome-depleted male mice, with the microbiome of mice 4 weeks after transplantation predicting donors’ testosterone levels..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The gut microbiota influences many physiological processes in mammals, and disruption of this diverse bacterial community can impair liver function, leading to disease. However, the molecular mechanisms of gut microbiota–intestine–liver communication are unclear. By analyzing public hepatic transcriptomics datasets, researchers recently identified pregnane X receptor (PXR) as a regulator of many differentially expressed genes in microbe-free vs. normal mice. The PXR target genes were largely associated with xenobiotic metabolism. Additional experiments in mice revealed that PXR deletion induced sex-specific changes in gut microbiota composition and hepatic gene expression. Microbiota depletion with antibiotics also induced PXR-dependent alterations in hepatic gene expression that differed between male and female mice. Further studies in male mice confirmed that elimination of the microbiota altered hepatic lipid and xenobiotic metabolism, and this effect was dependent on the presence of PXR..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Life, in all its forms, is a constant balance of energy and matter. A look at any food web reveals how organisms are tightly connected to each other and their environment. On the smallest and most fundamental scale, the process is cyclical. Atoms representing vital minerals flow in a never-ending circuit from one sink to the next. Understanding this flow helps scientists answer questions about how organisms transform food into energy and body mass for growth and survival. But while these strategies tend to vary with species, life stage, and sex, studies often treat members of a population as being, for all intents and purposes, the same. Researchers from Jagiellonian University in Poland are taking a different approach. By tracking the assimilation, excretion, and allocation of the individual minerals found in pollen, they’re beginning to understand how the diet of the red mason bee contributes to its growth and survival and how the nutritional budget differs with life stage and sex..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.