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The pituitary gland is formed by the juxtaposition of two tissues: neuroectoderm arising from the basal diencephalon, and oral epithelium, which invaginates towards the central nervous system from the roof of ...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2013 11:70
Thyroid hormone (TH) is best known for its role in development in animals, and for its control of metabolic heat production (thermogenesis) during cold acclimation in mammals. It is unknown whether the regulat...
Copy-number variation (CNV), rather than complete loss of gene function, is increasingly implicated in human disease. Moreover, gene dosage is recognised as important in tumourigenesis, and there is an increas...
Although intron loss in evolution has been described, the mechanism involved is still unclear. Three models have been proposed, the reverse transcriptase (RT) model, genomic deletion model and double-strand-br...
The directional migration and the following development of primordial germ cells (PGCs) during gonad formation are key steps for germline development. It has been proposed that the interaction between germ cel...
Vertebrate predators use a broad arsenal of behaviors and weaponry for overcoming fractious and potentially dangerous prey. A unique array of predatory strategies occur among snakes, ranging from mechanical mo...
The nuclear factor-KappaB (NF-κB) pathway is conserved from fruit flies to humans and is a key mediator of inflammatory signaling. Aberrant regulation of NF-κB is associated with several disorders including au...
Methanobactins (Mbns) are a family of copper-binding natural products involved in copper uptake by methanotrophic bacteria. The few Mbns that have been structurally characterized feature copper coordination by...
A number of studies have established that stochasticity in gene expression may play an important role in many biological phenomena. This therefore calls for further investigations to identify the molecular mec...
Mutations causing antibiotic resistance are often associated with a cost in the absence of antibiotics. Surprisingly, a new study found that bacteria adapting to increased temperature became resistant to rifam...
In the mouse ovary, oocytes initially develop in clusters termed germ-cell nests. Shortly after birth, these germ-cell nests break apart, and the oocytes individually become surrounded by somatic granulosa cel...
Skeletal muscle undergoes rapid atrophy upon denervation and the underlying mechanisms are complicated. FOXO3a has been implicated as a major mediator of muscle atrophy, but how its subcellular location and ac...
Drosophila melanogaster has served as a powerful model system for genetic studies of courtship songs. To accelerate research on the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying courtship song, we have developed a sen...
In caves one repeatedly finds strikingly convergent patterns of evolution in diverse sets of organisms involving 'regressive' traits such as the loss of eyes and pigmentation. Ongoing debate centers around whe...
Significant effects of recent global climate change have already been observed in a variety of ecosystems, with evidence for shifts in species ranges, but rarely have such consequences been related to the chan...
The propensity of cancer cells to convert high levels of glucose to lactate through aerobic glycolysis has been intensively studied in vitro, and is now understood to be a metabolic adaptation that shunts glucose...
DNA methylation serves as an important epigenetic mark in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms. In eukaryotes, the most common epigenetic mark is 5-methylcytosine, whereas prokaryotes can have 6-methylade...
Contrary to the longstanding view that newts (Notophthalamus viridescens), but notaxolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum), can regenerate a lens, a recent report in BMC Biologyby Panagiotis Tsonis and colleagues shows axo...
Like human infants, songbirds learn their species-specific vocalizations through imitation learning. The birdsong system has emerged as a widely used experimental animal model for understanding the underlying ...
How and why animals lose eyesight during adaptation to the dark and food-limited cave environment has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin. More recently, several different adaptive hypotheses have been...
Calcium-activated photoproteins are luciferase variants found in photocyte cells of bioluminescent jellyfish (Phylum Cnidaria) and comb jellies (Phylum Ctenophora). The complete genomic sequence from the cteno...
The dramatic ingression of tissue sheets that accompanies many morphogenetic processes, most notably gastrulation, has been largely attributed to contractile circum-apical actomyosin 'purse-strings' in the inf...
The clockwise rotation of cilia in the developing mammalian embryo drives a leftward flow of liquid; this genetically regulated biophysical force specifies left-right asymmetry of the mammalian body. How leftw...
Males and females differ in many ways and might present different opportunities and challenges to their parasites. In the same way that parasites adapt to the most common host type, they may adapt to the chara...
Among vertebrates lens regeneration is most pronounced in newts, which have the ability to regenerate the entire lens throughout their lives. Regeneration occurs from the dorsal iris by transdifferentiation of...
Harmful algal blooms deteriorate the services of aquatic ecosystems. They are often formed by cyanobacteria composed of genotypes able to produce a certain toxin, for example, the hepatotoxin microcystin (MC),...
In the absence of a vaccine or a cure, identification of novel HIV-1 inhibitors remains important. A paper in Retrovirology describes a rationally designed bi-specific protein that irreversibly damages the viral ...
In complex animal vocalizations, such as bird or whale song, a great variety of songs can be produced via rearrangements of a smaller set of 'syllables', known as 'phonological syntax' or 'phonocoding' However...
All animals are anatomically constrained in the number of discrete call types they can produce. Recent studies suggest that by combining existing calls into meaningful sequences, animals can increase the infor...
Conditional gene knockout (cKO) mediated by the Cre/LoxP system is indispensable for exploring gene functions in mice. However, a major limitation of this method is that gene KO is not reversible. A number of ...
Pupylation is a post-translational protein modification occurring in actinobacteria through which the small, intrinsically disordered protein Pup (prokaryotic ubiquitin-like protein) is conjugated to lysine re...
Gastrulation is a key transition in embryogenesis; it requires self-organized cellular coordination, which has to be both robust to allow efficient development and plastic to provide adaptability. Despite the ...
We have investigated a simple strategy for enhancing transgene expression specificity by leveraging genetic silencer elements. The approach serves to restrict transgene expression to a tissue of interest - the...
Logic-derived modeling has been used to map biological networks and to study arbitrary functional interactions, and fine-grained kinetic modeling can accurately predict the detailed behavior of well-characteri...
Most if not all animals sense temperature using specialized thermosensory neurons. Genetic studies in simple organisms have been used to identify gene products required for detecting temperature changes or for...
This work describes the first genome-wide analysis of the transcriptional landscape of the pig. A new porcine Affymetrix expression array was designed in order to provide comprehensive coverage of the known pi...
Many biological studies are carried out on large populations of cells, often in order to obtain enough material to make measurements. However, we now know that noise is endemic in biological systems and this r...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2009 7:47
Responding to noxious stimuli by invoking an appropriate escape response is critical for survival of an organism. The sensations of small and large changes in temperature in most organisms have been studied se...
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