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Taste receptor cells are responsible for transducing chemical stimuli from the environment and relaying information to the nervous system. Bitter, sweet and umami stimuli utilize G-protein coupled receptors wh...
Habitat variation strongly influences the evolution of developmentally flexible traits, and may drive speciation and diversification. The plethodontid salamander Eurycea tynerensis is endemic to the geologically ...
Soon after the first algorithms for RNA folding became available, it was recognised that the prediction of only one energetically optimal structure is insufficient to achieve reliable results. An in-depth anal...
Runx proteins are developmentally important metazoan transcription factors that form a heterodimeric complex with the non-homologous protein Core Binding Factor β (CBFβ). CBFβ allosterically enhances Runx DNA ...
The phylum Chlorophyta contains the majority of the green algae and is divided into four classes. The basal position of the Prasinophyceae has been well documented, but the divergence order of the Ulvophyceae,...
Stem cells divide to reproduce themselves and produce differentiated progeny. A fundamental problem in human biology has been the inability to measure how often stem cells divide. Although it is impossible to ...
The provision of stress resistance diverts resources from development and reproduction and must therefore be tightly regulated. In Caenorhabditis elegans, the switch to increased stress resistance to promote surv...
Sec8 is highly expressed in mammalian nervous systems and has been proposed to play a role in several aspects of neural development and function, including neurite outgrowth, calcium-dependent neurotransmitter...
Toxoplasma gondii gives rise to toxoplasmosis, among the most prevalent parasitic diseases of animals and man. Transformation of the tachzyoite stage into the latent bradyzoite-cyst form underlies chronic diseas...
Myelination requires precise control of oligodendrocyte morphology and myelin generation at each of the axons contacted by an individual cell. This control must involve the integration of extracellular cues, s...
Recent analysis of the human and mouse genomes has shown that a substantial proportion of protein coding genes and cis-regulatory elements contain transposable element (TE) sequences, implicating TE domestication...
Signaling by the Wnt family of secreted glycoproteins through their receptors, the frizzled (Fz) family of seven-pass transmembrane proteins, is critical for numerous cell fate and tissue polarity decisions du...
The Streptophyta comprise all land plants and six monophyletic groups of charophycean green algae. Phylogenetic analyses of four genes from three cellular compartments support the following branching order for...
Compartmentalization is a key feature of eukaryotic cells, but its evolution remains poorly understood. GTPases are the oldest enzymes that use nucleotides as substrates and they participate in a wide range of...
Rice is an important staple food and, with the smallest cereal genome, serves as a reference species for studies on the evolution of cereals and other grasses. Therefore, decoding its entire genome will be a p...
Regular exercise reduces cardiovascular and metabolic disease partly through improved aerobic fitness. The determinants of exercise-induced gains in aerobic fitness in humans are not known. We have demonstrate...
Runx transcription factors play critical roles in the developmental control of cell fate and contribute variously as oncoproteins and tumor suppressors to leukemia and other cancers. To discover fundamental Ru...
Echolocating bats emit vocalizations that can be classified either as echolocation calls or communication calls. Neural control of both types of calls must govern the same pool of motoneurons responsible for v...
Given the complexity of higher organisms, the number of genes encoded by their genomes is surprisingly small. Tissue specific regulation of expression and splicing are major factors enhancing the number of the...
The role of centrioles in mitotic spindle function remains unclear. One approach to investigate mitotic centriole function is to ask whether mutation of centriole-associated proteins can cause genomic instabil...
PCI/MPN domain protein complexes comprise the 19S proteasome lid, the COP9 signalosome (CSN), and eukaryotic translation initiation factor 3 (eIF3). The eIF3 complex is thought to be composed of essential core...
The TyrA protein family includes members that catalyze two dehydrogenase reactions in distinct pathways leading to L-tyrosine and a third reaction that is not part of tyrosine biosynthesis. Family members shar...
Flowering plant development is wholly reliant on growth from meristems, which contain totipotent cells that give rise to all post-embryonic organs in the plant. Plants are uniquely able to alter their developm...
A key event in plant morphogenesis is the establishment of a division plane. A plant-specific microtubular preprophase band (PPB) accurately predicts the line of cell division, whereas the phragmoplast, anothe...
In lakes with a deep-water algal maximum, herbivorous zooplankton are faced with a trade-off between high temperature but low food availability in the surface layers and low temperature but sufficient food in ...
The condition of many marine mammals varies with fluctuations in productivity and food supply in the ocean basin where they forage. Prey is impacted by physical environmental variables such as cyclic warming t...
Parasites exploit sophisticated strategies to evade host immunity that require both adaptation of existing genes and evolution of new gene families. We have addressed this question by testing the immunological...
Since the initial publication of its complete genome sequence, Arabidopsis thaliana has become more important than ever as a model for plant research. However, the initial genome annotation was submitted by multi...
It is a matter of ongoing debate whether a universal species concept is possible for bacteria. Indeed, it is not clear whether closely related isolates of bacteria typically form discrete genotypic clusters th...
Because "laws of nature" do not exist in ecology, much of the foundations of community ecology rely on broad statistical generalisations. One of the strongest generalisations is the positive relationship betwe...
Excessive sequential stereotypy of behavioral patterns (sequential super-stereotypy) in Tourette's syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is thought to involve dysfunction in nigrostriatal dopamine s...
The physiological regulation of G protein-coupled receptors, through desensitization and internalization, modulates the length of the receptor signal and may influence the development of tolerance and dependen...
The availability of abundant sequence data from key model organisms has made large scale studies of molecular evolution an exciting possibility. Here we use full length cDNA alignments comprising more than 700...
Drosophila discs-large (DLG) is the sole representative of a large class of mammalian MAGUKs, including human DLG, SAP 97, SAP102, and PSD-95. MAGUKs are thought to be critical for postsynaptic assembly at gluta...
Tumour regression observed in many conditional mouse models following oncogene inactivation provides the impetus to develop, and a platform to preclinically evaluate, novel therapeutics to inactivate specific ...
Does the C. elegans nervous system contain multi-neuron computational modules that perform stereotypical functions? We attempt to answer this question by searching for recurring multi-neuron inter-connectivity pa...
Gab1 is a docking protein that recruits phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase (PI-3 kinase) and other effector proteins in response to the activation of many receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs). As the autophosphorylatio...
Insulin receptor substrate (IRS) proteins are key moderators of insulin action. Their specific regulation determines downstream protein-protein interactions and confers specificity on growth factor signalling....
Our aim was to determine if pramipexole, a D3 preferring agonist, effectively reduced dopamine neuron and fiber loss in the 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) mouse model when given at intraperit...
In mammals, there is evidence suggesting that methyl-CpG binding proteins may play a significant role in histone modification through their association with modification complexes that can deacetylate and/or m...
Focal clusters of slow wave activity in the delta frequency range (1–4 Hz), as measured by magnetencephalography (MEG), are usually located in the vicinity of structural damage in the brain. Such oscillations ...
Joining a model for the molecular evolution of a protein family to the paleontological and geological records (geobiology), and then to the chemical structures of substrates, products, and protein folds, is em...
Bistability and hysteresis are increasingly recognized as major properties of regulatory networks governing numerous biological phenomena, such as differentiation and cell cycle progression. The full scope of ...
The callipyge mutation is located within an imprinted gene cluster on ovine chromosome 18. The callipyge trait exhibits polar overdominant inheritance due to the fact that only heterozygotes inheriting a mutan...
Humans die at an increasing rate until late in life, when mortality rates level off. The causes of the late-life mortality plateau have been debated extensively over the past few years. Here, I examine mortali...
The growing conviction that lateral gene transfer plays a significant role in prokaryote genealogy opens up a need for comprehensive evaluations of gene-enzyme systems on a case-by-case basis. Genes of tryptop...
Cerebellar granule cell precursors are specifically generated within the hindbrain segment, rhombomere 1, which is bounded rostrally by the midbrain/hindbrain isthmus and caudally by the boundary of the Hoxa2 exp...
Over the past few years, the use of molecular techniques to detect cultivation-independent, eukaryotic diversity has proven to be a powerful approach. Based on small-subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA) gene analy...
The observation of multiple genetic markers in situ by optical microscopy and their relevance to the study of three-dimensional (3D) chromosomal organization in the nucleus have been greatly developed in the last...
DNA polymerase ε (Pol ε) is essential for S-phase replication, DNA damage repair and checkpoint control in yeast. A pol2-Y831A mutation leading to a tyrosine to alanine change in the Pol ε active site does not ca...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2007 5:27
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