The More the Merrier?

The trade-off between traits in life-history strategies has been widely studied for sexual and parthenogenetic organisms, but relatively little is known about the reproduction strategies of asexual animals. Here, we investigate clonal reproduction in the freshwater planarian Schmidtea mediterranea, an important model organism for regeneration and stem cell research. We find that these flatworms adopt a randomized reproduction strategy that comprises both asymmetric binary fission and fragmentation (generation of multiple offspring during a reproduction cycle). Fragmentation in planarians has primarily been regarded as an abnormal behavior in the past; using a large-scale experimental approach, we now show that about one third of the reproduction events in S. mediterranea are fragmentations, implying that fragmentation is part of their normal reproductive behavior. Our analysis further suggests that certain characteristic aspects of the reproduction statistics can be explained in terms of a maximum relative entropy principle.     

Double fluorescence lifetimes of metal-free phthalocyanine in a mixed-solvent Shpol'skii matrix at 4·2 K

We report identical double fluorescence lifetimes of τ = 3·7 and 6·3 ns for the 0-0 fluorescences of each of the two tautomeric species of metal-free phthalocyanine (H₂Pc) in a mixed solvent matrix of α-chloronaphthalene and n-octane at 4·2K. Such double lifetime feature has not been reported previously for this molecule nor, to our knowledge, for any of the related phthalocyanines and porphyrins.     

Three New Chiral Aminoethers from Tartaric Acid for Improved Asymmetric Syntheses with Organolithium Reactions. Preliminary communication

The chiral aminoethers 1–4 , accessible from tartaric acid, are tested as complexing ligands in organolithium reactions. The tetramine 4 turns out to cause highest inductions [see Table 2 and Equations (1)–(4)].