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The pygopus gene of Drosophila encodes an essential component of the Armadillo (β-catenin) transcription factor complex of canonical Wnt signaling. To better understand the functions of Pygopus-mediated canonical...
Bacterial motility is a crucial factor in the colonization of natural environments. Escherichia coli has two flagella-driven motility types: swimming and swarming. Swimming motility consists of individual cell mo...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2006 4:34
Balancing selection operating for long evolutionary periods at a locus is characterized by the maintenance of distinct alleles because of a heterozygote or rare-allele advantage. The loci under balancing selec...
Reduction or elimination of vector populations will tend to reduce or eliminate transmission of vector-borne diseases. One potential method for environmentally-friendly, species-specific population control is ...
The Ras-related GTPase, Rheb, regulates the growth of animal cells. Genetic and biochemical tests place Rheb upstream of the target of rapamycin (TOR) protein kinase, and downstream of the tuberous sclerosis c...
Inherited bacteria that kill male offspring, male-killers, are known to be common in insects, but little is understood about the mechanisms used by male-killing bacteria to kill males. In this paper we describ...
The apparent rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Campephilus principalis in Arkansas, USA, previously feared extinct, was supported by video evidence of a single bird in flight (Fitzpatrick et al, Science ...
The parasitic sucking lice of primates are known to have undergone at least 25 million years of coevolution with their hosts. For example, chimpanzee lice and human head/body lice last shared a common ancestor...
Despite advances in imaging techniques, real-time visualization of the structure and dynamics of tissues and organs inside small living animals has remained elusive. Recently, we have been using synchrotron x-...
Guenons (tribe Cercopithecini) are a species-rich group of primates that have attracted considerable attention from both primatologists and evolutionary biologists. The complex speciation pattern has made the ...
Transcription of large numbers of non-coding RNAs originating from intronic regions of human genes has been recently reported, but mechanisms governing their biosynthesis and biological functions are largely u...
Insects that feed on plants contribute greatly to the generation of biodiversity. Hypotheses explaining rate increases in phytophagous insect diversification and mechanisms driving speciation in such specialis...
The Viridiplantae comprise two major phyla: the Streptophyta, containing the charophycean green algae and all land plants, and the Chlorophyta, containing the remaining green algae. Despite recent progress in ...
Embryos of taxonomically different vertebrates are thought to pass through a stage in which they resemble one another morphologically. This "vertebrate phylotypic stage" may represent the basic vertebrate body...
TBLASTN is a mode of operation for BLAST that aligns protein sequences to a nucleotide database translated in all six frames. We present the first description of the modern implementation of TBLASTN, focusing ...
Instructions to fabricate mineralized structures with distinct nanoscale architectures, such as seashells and coral and vertebrate skeletons, are encoded in the genomes of a wide variety of animals. In mollusk...
Present protein interaction network data sets include only interactions among subsets of the proteins in an organism. Previously this has been ignored, but in principle any global network analysis that only lo...
Inteins are self-splicing protein elements. They are translated as inserts within host proteins that excise themselves and ligate the flanking portions of the host protein (exteins) with a peptide bond. They a...
Several lines of evidence suggest that codon usage in the Drosophila saltans and D. willistoni lineages has shifted towards a less frequent use of GC-ending codons. Introns in these lineages show a parallel shift...
Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) is known as a powerful regulator of white blood cell proliferation and differentiation in mammals. We, and others, have shown that G-CSF is effective in treating c...
Fertilization restores the diploid state and begins the process by which the single-cell oocyte is converted into a polarized, multicellular organism. In the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, two of the earliest ...
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes have become popular tools for tracing maternal ancestry, and several companies offer this service to the general public. Numerous studies have demonstrated that human mtDNA...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2007 5:13
Coding variants of the prion protein gene (PRNP) have been shown to be major determinants for the susceptibility to transmitted prion diseases in humans, mice and sheep. However, to date, the effects of polymorph...
While traditional models of Alzheimer's disease focused on large fibrillar deposits of the Aβ42 amyloid peptide in the brain, recent work suggests that the major pathogenic effects may be attributed to SDS-stable...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) to the plant mitochondrial genome has recently been shown to occur at a surprisingly high rate; however, little evidence has been found for HGT to the plastid genome, despite ext...
Mean phosphorous:nitrogen (P:N) ratios and relationships of P:N ratios with the growth rate of organisms indicate a surprising similarity among and within microbial species, plants, and insect herbivores. To r...
Protein translocation to the proper cellular destination may be guided by various classes of sorting signals recognizable in the primary sequence. Detection in some genomes, but not others, may reveal sorting ...
Human embryonic stem cells (hESC) offer a renewable source of a wide range of cell types for use in research and cell-based therapies to treat disease. Inspection of protein markers provides important informat...
Congenital aniridia caused by heterozygousity at the PAX6 locus is associated with ocular surface disease including keratopathy. It is not clear whether the keratopathy is a direct result of reduced PAX6 gene dos...
The Caenorhabditis elegans male exhibits a stereotypic behavioral pattern when attempting to mate. This behavior has been divided into the following steps: response, backing, turning, vulva location, spicule inse...
A combination of magnetoencephalography and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to correlate the electrophysiology of rapid auditory processing and the neurochemistry of the auditory cortex in 15 h...
Histone deacetylases are enzymes that modify core histones and play key roles in transcriptional regulation, chromatin assembly, DNA repair, and recombination in eukaryotes. Three types of related histone deac...
The present study aimed to investigate the time course of electrocortical facilitation for affectively arousing written words during the so-called 'attentional blink' (AB) period in a rapid serial visual prese...
G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play a crucial role in many biological processes and represent a major class of drug targets. However, purification of GPCRs for biochemical study is difficult and current m...
Efficient host exploitation by parasites is frequently likely to depend on cooperative behaviour. Under these conditions, mixed-strain infections are predicted to show lower virulence (host mortality) than are...
DBA/2J (D2) mice develop an age-related form of glaucoma. Their eyes progressively develop iris pigment dispersion and iris atrophy followed by increased intraocular pressure (IOP) and glaucomatous optic nerve...
All eukaryotes with the exception of plants use an actomyosin ring to generate a constriction force at the site of cell division (cleavage furrow) during mitosis and meiosis. The structure and filament forming...
The common vampire bat Desmodus rotundus is one of three bat species that feed exclusively on the blood of mammals often more than 1000 times its size. Vampire bats even feed on human blood. Moreover, they tend t...
The processes by which eggs develop in the insect ovary are well characterized. Despite a large number of Drosophila mutants that cannot lay eggs, the way that the egg is moved along the reproductive tract from o...
Evolution of the deuterostome lineage was accompanied by an increase in systematic complexity especially with regard to highly specialized tissues and organs. Based on the observation of an increased number of...
Pneumococcal meningitis is associated with high mortality (~30%) and morbidity. Up to 50% of survivors are affected by neurological sequelae due to a wide spectrum of brain injury mainly affecting the cortex a...
The RB1 gene was the first tumor suppressor gene cloned from humans by studying genetic lesions in families with retinoblastoma. Children who inherit one defective copy of the RB1 gene have an increased susceptib...
Interleukin 4 (IL-4) is a key regulator of the immune system and an important factor in the development of allergic hypersensitivity. Together with interleukin 13 (IL-13), IL-4 plays an important role in exace...
Loss of photosynthesis has occurred independently in several plant and algal lineages, and represents a major metabolic shift with potential consequences for the content and structure of plastid genomes. To in...
The view that gene flow between related animal species is rare and evolutionarily unimportant largely antedates sensitive molecular techniques. Here we use DNA sequencing to investigate a pair of morphological...
Carotenoids are pigment molecules produced mainly in plants and heavily exploited by a wide range of organisms higher up in the food-chain. The fundamental processes regulating how carotenoids are absorbed and...
Polycomb-group genes (PcG) encode proteins that maintain homeotic (Hox) gene repression throughout development. Conversely, trithorax-group (trxG) genes encode positive factors required for maintenance of long t...
Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) is typically considered to mediate aversive aspects of stress, fear and anxiety. However, CRF release in the brain is also elicited by natural rewards and incentive cues, r...
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...
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