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Western blotting is among the most common techniques used in molecular biology and a simple way of assessing the presence or absence of a protein. It is also commonly used to compare protein levels in differen...
Probing dynamic processes occurring within the cell nucleus at the quantitative level has long been a challenge in mammalian biology. Advances in bio-imaging techniques over the past decade have enabled us to ...
The study of any biological features, including genomic sequences, typically revolves around the question: what is this for? However, population genetic theory, combined with the data of comparative genomics, ...
Brassinosteroids (BRs) are a class of polyhydroxylated steroidal phytohormones in plants with similar structures to animals’ steroid hormones. Brassinosteroids regulate a wide range of physiological processes ...
Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2)-catalyzed H3K27me3 marks are tightly associated with the WUS-AG negative feedback loop to terminate floral stem cell fate to promote carpel development, but the roles of Polyc...
Collective neural crest cell migration is critical to the form and function of the vertebrate face and neck, distributing bone, cartilage, and nerve cells into peripheral targets that are intimately linked wit...
The whitefly Bemisia tabaci (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae) is among the 100 worst invasive species in the world. As one of the most important crop pests and virus vectors, B. tabaci causes substantial crop losses and p...
Mutations in Lipopolysaccharide-induced tumour necrosis factor-α factor (LITAF) cause the autosomal dominant inherited peripheral neuropathy, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1C (CMT1C). LITAF encodes a 17 kDa pr...
Palmitoylation, the addition of palmitate to proteins by palmitoyl acyltransferases (PATs), is an important regulator of synaptic protein localization and function. Many palmitoylated proteins and PATs have be...
Defects in genes involved in mitochondrial fatty-acid oxidation (mFAO) reduce the ability of patients to cope with metabolic challenges. mFAO enzymes accept multiple substrates of different chain length, leadi...
Transcriptome studies have revealed that many eukaryotic genomes are pervasively transcribed producing numerous long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). However, only a few lncRNAs have been ascribed a cellular role th...
Many pathogens secrete toxins that target key host processes resulting in the activation of immune pathways. The secreted Pseudomonas aeruginosa toxin Exotoxin A (ToxA) disrupts intestinal protein synthesis, whic...
Tribbles proteins are conserved pseudokinases that function to control kinase signalling and transcription in diverse biological processes. Abnormal function in human Tribbles has been implicated in a number o...
The specificity of synaptic connections is fundamental for proper neural circuit function. Specific neuronal connections that underlie information processing in the sensory cortex are initially established wit...
Lateral gene transfer (LGT) is the transmission of genes, sometimes across species barriers, outwith the classic vertical inheritance from parent to offspring. LGT is recognized as an important phenomenon that...
Delving into European prehistory, two recent studies analyze ancient DNA from bison species depicted by our ancestors on the walls of their caves. The DNA tells a story of migrations driven by climate change b...
Releases of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes have been shown to be an effective method of controlling Aedes aegypti, the main vector of dengue fever, in Australia. A study in BMC Biology from Penelope Hancock and ot...
Pseudoenzymes are catalytically deficient variants of enzymes that are represented in all major enzyme families. Their regulatory functions in signalling pathways are shedding new light on the non-catalytic fu...
The several-micrometer-sized Toxoplasma gondii protozoan parasite invades virtually any type of nucleated cell from a warm-blooded animal within seconds. Toxoplasma initiates the formation of a tight ring-like ju...
Arbovirus transmission by the mosquito Aedes aegypti can be reduced by the introduction and establishment of the endosymbiotic bacteria Wolbachia in wild populations of the vector. Wolbachia spreads by increasing...
TPA Induced Sequence 7 acts as a transcriptional co-regulator controlling the expression of genes involved in differentiation of various cell types, including skeletal myoblasts. We and others have shown that ...
In vertebrate organisms, the neural crest (NC) gives rise to multipotential and highly migratory progenitors which are distributed throughout the embryo and generate, among other structures, the peripheral ner...
Climatic and environmental fluctuations as well as anthropogenic pressure have led to the extinction of much of Europe’s megafauna. The European bison or wisent (Bison bonasus), one of the last wild European larg...
A common symbiont of insects, the bacterium Wolbachia has been implicated in phenomena as diverse as sex determination, pathogen defence and speciation and is being used in public health programs to prevent mosqu...
Relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is one of the main causes of mortality in childhood malignancies. Previous genetic studies demonstrated that chemoresistant ALL is driven by activating mutations in NT5...
The red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum is an emerging insect model organism representing the largest insect order, Coleoptera, which encompasses several serious agricultural and forest pests. Despite the ecolog...
The literature harbors many claims for lateral gene transfer (LGT) from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. Such claims are typically founded in analyses of genome sequences. It is undisputed that many genes entered th...
The navigation of magnetotactic bacteria relies on specific intracellular organelles, the magnetosomes, which are membrane-enclosed crystals of magnetite aligned into a linear chain. The magnetosome chain acts...
The General Control Nonderepressible 2 (GCN2) kinase is a conserved member of the integrated stress response (ISR) pathway that represses protein translation and helps cells to adapt to conditions of nutrient ...
Application of apomixis, or asexual seed formation, in crop breeding would allow rapid fixation of complex traits, economizing improved crop delivery. Identification of apomixis genes is confounded by the poly...
Any figure in a research article will typically represent only a small portion of the total data gained by a researcher for that experiment, and it is therefore key that the figure accurately reflects what was...
In February 2016, a new fungal disease was spotted in wheat fields across eight districts in Bangladesh. The epidemic spread to an estimated 15,000 hectares, about 16 % of the cultivated wheat area in Banglade...
Like most animals, insects rely on their olfactory systems for finding food and mates and in avoiding noxious chemicals and predators. Most insect olfactory neurons express an odorant-specific odorant receptor...
Peptidyl-prolyl isomerases (PPIases) catalyze cis/trans isomerization of peptidyl-prolyl bonds, which is often rate-limiting for protein folding. SlyD is a two-domain enzyme containing both a PPIase FK506-bind...
Due to the paucity of novel antibiotics, colistin has become a last resort antibiotic for treating multidrug resistant bacteria. Colistin acts by binding the lipid A component of lipopolysaccharides and subseq...
Release of sterile insects, the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT), can be an extremely effective and precise method of pest control. A study in BMC Biology from the New World screwworm SIT program and others shows t...
Jasmonates (JAs) are a class of plant hormones that play essential roles in response to tissue wounding. They act on gene expression to slow down growth and to redirect metabolism towards producing defense mol...
As both larvae and adults, mosquitoes encounter a barrage of immune insults, ranging from microbe-rich communities in larval habitats to ingested blood-borne pathogens in adult blood meals. Given that mosquit...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2016 14:62
Casitas B-lineage lymphoma (Cbl or c-Cbl) is a RING ubiquitin ligase that negatively regulates protein tyrosine kinase (PTK) signalling. Phosphorylation of a conserved residue (Tyr371) on the linker helix regi...
The red algae (Rhodophyta) diverged from the green algae and plants (Viridiplantae) over one billion years ago within the kingdom Archaeplastida. These photosynthetic lineages provide an ideal model to study p...
High directional persistence is often assumed to enhance the efficiency of chemotactic migration. Yet, cells in vivo usually display meandering trajectories with relatively low directional persistence, and the...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2016 14:59
The New World screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax, is a devastating pest of livestock endemic to subtropical and tropical regions of the Western hemisphere. The larvae of this species feed on the tissue of living ...
The Cry6 family of proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis represents a group of powerful toxins with great potential for use in the control of coleopteran insects and of nematode parasites of importance to agricult...
ATG1 belongs to the Uncoordinated-51-like kinase protein family. Members of this family are best characterized for roles in macroautophagy and neuronal development. Apoptosis-induced proliferation (AiP) is a c...
After viral infection and the stimulation of some pattern-recognition receptors, TANK-binding kinase I (TBK1) is activated by K63-linked polyubiquitination followed by trans-autophosphorylation. While the activat...
The known plant viruses mostly infect angiosperm hosts and have RNA or small DNA genomes. The only other lineage of green plants with a relatively well-studied virome, unicellular chlorophyte algae, is mostly ...
Auxin is an essential molecule that controls almost every aspect of plant development. Although the core signaling components that control auxin response are well characterized, the precise mechanisms enabling...
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