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There are many reasons to be interested in stem cells, one of the most prominent being their potential use in finding better drugs to treat human disease. This article focuses on how this may be implemented. R...
Stem cells are the target of mutations that can lead to life threatening diseases. However, stem cell populations tend to be small and therefore clonal expansion of mutant cells is highly sensitive to stochast...
Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved lysosomal degradation route for soluble components of the cytosol and organelles. There is great interest in identifying compounds that modulate autophagy because they ...
Autophagy mediates lysosomal degradation of cytosolic components. Recent work has associated autophagic dysfunction with pathologies, including cancer and cardiovascular disease. To date, the identification of...
Stable isotope tracing is a powerful technique for following the fate of individual atoms through metabolic pathways. Measuring isotopic enrichment in metabolites provides quantitative insights into the biosyn...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2012 10:74
GINS is an essential eukaryotic DNA replication factor that is found in a simplified form in Archaea. A new study in this issue of BMC Biology reveals the first structure of the archaeal GINS complex. The structu...
Simply hearing the song produced by another bird of the same species triggers the regulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) in high-order auditory parts of the zebra finch brain. Some of the identified miRNAs appear to...
Microarrays first made the analysis of the transcriptome possible, and have produced much important information. Today, however, researchers are increasingly turning to direct high-throughput sequencing - RNA-...
The proteasome is a multi-subunit protein machine that is the final destination for cellular proteins that have been marked for degradation via an ubiquitin (Ub) chain appendage. These ubiquitylated proteins e...
Gq is a heterotrimeric G protein that plays an important role in numerous physiological processes. To delineate the molecular mechanisms and kinetics of signalling through this protein, its activation should b...
DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1) has been shown to be phosphorylated on multiple serine and threonine residues, based on cell type and physiological conditions. Although recent studies have suggested that prote...
The X chromosome has fewer testis-specific genes than autosomes in many species. This bias is commonly attributed to X inactivation in spermatogenesis but a recent paper in BMC Biology provides evidence against X...
Paucity of male-biased genes on the Drosophila X chromosome is a well-established phenomenon, thought to be specifically linked to the role of these genes in reproduction and/or their expression in the meiotic ma...
In the early stage of eukaryotic DNA replication, the template DNA is unwound by the MCM helicase, which is activated by forming a complex with the Cdc45 and GINS proteins. The eukaryotic GINS forms a heterote...
Erythropoietin (EPO) and its receptor (EPOR) are expressed in the developing brain and their transcription is upregulated in adult neurons and glia upon injury or neurodegeneration. We have shown neuroprotecti...
Hox genes modify serial homology patterns in many organisms, exemplified in vertebrates by modification of the axial skeleton and in arthropods by diversification of the body segments. Butterfly wing eyespots ...
Metalloproteins are essential for many cellular functions, but it has not been clear how they distinguish between the different metals to bind the correct ones. A report in BMC Biology finds that preferences of t...
Polyploidization is the multiplication of the whole chromosome complement and has occurred frequently in vascular plants. Maintenance of stable polyploid state over generations requires special mechanisms to c...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Biology 2012 10:33
Group I and II introns can be considered as molecular parasites that interrupt protein-coding and structural RNA genes in all domains of life. They function as self-splicing ribozymes and thereby limit the phe...
The ability to analyze gene function in malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites has received a boost with a recent paper in BMC Genomics that describes a genome-wide mutagenesis system in the rodent malaria species
Polyploidy is important from a phylogenetic perspective because of its immense past impact on evolution and its potential future impact on diversification, survival and adaptation, especially in plants. Molecu...
Many cancer cells develop resistance to tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL)-induced apoptosis, necessitating combination with chemotherapy, and normal cells manifest side effects du...
The expression of intermediate filaments (IFs) is a hallmark feature of metazoan cells. IFs play a central role in cell organization and function, acting mainly as structural stress-absorbing elements. There i...
Intermediate filaments include the nuclear lamins, which are universal in metazoans, and the cytoplasmic intermediate filaments, which are much more varied and form cell type-specific networks in animal cells....
Haploinsufficient (HI) genes are those for which a reduction in copy number in a diploid from two to one results in significantly reduced fitness. Haploinsufficiency is increasingly implicated in human disease...
Evc is essential for Indian Hedgehog (Hh) signalling in the cartilage growth plate. The gene encoding Evc2 is in close proximity in divergent orientation to Evc and mutations in both human genes lead to the chond...
In developmental biology, the accumulation of qualitative phenotypic descriptions has fueled the need for testable parsimonious hypotheses, giving a fresh impetus to quantitative strategies. As an illustration...
Infection processes consist of a sequence of steps, each critical for the interaction between host and parasite. Studies of host-parasite interactions rarely take into account the fact that different steps mig...
Sequencing of expressed genes has shown that nematodes, particularly the plant-parasitic nematodes, have genes purportedly acquired from other kingdoms by horizontal gene transfer. The prevailing orthodoxy is ...
Sequence analysis of the Daphnia pulex genome holds some surprises that could not have been anticipated from what was learned so far from other arthropod genomes. It establishes Daphnia as an eco-genetical model ...
Evidence that conserved developmental gene-regulatory networks can change as a unit during deutersostome evolution emerges from a study published in BMC Biology. This shows that genes consistently expressed in an...
The interferon-inducible immunity-related GTPases (IRG proteins/p47 GTPases) are a distinctive family of GTPases that function as powerful cell-autonomous resistance factors. The IRG protein, Irga6 (IIGP1), pa...
Protein interactions control the regulatory networks underlying developmental processes. The understanding of developmental complexity will, therefore, require the characterization of protein interactions with...
The degree of metal binding specificity in metalloproteins such as metallothioneins (MTs) can be crucial for their functional accuracy. Unlike most other animal species, pulmonate molluscs possess homometallic...
The phylum to which humans belong, Chordata, takes its name from one of the major shared derived features of the group, the notochord. All chordates have a notochord, at least during embryogenesis, and there i...
Archaeological studies have revealed a series of cultural changes around the Last Glacial Maximum in East Asia; whether these changes left any signatures in the gene pool of East Asians remains poorly indicate...
Thalamocortical projections convey visual, somatosensory and auditory information to the cerebral cortex. A recent report in Neural Development shows how a forward genetic screen has enabled the identification of...
Leaf-cutting (attine) ants use their own fecal material to manure fungus gardens, which consist of leaf material overgrown by hyphal threads of the basidiomycete fungus Leucocoprinus gongylophorus that lives in s...
Determining the position and order of contigs and scaffolds from a genome assembly within an organism's genome remains a technical challenge in a majority of sequencing projects. In order to exploit contempora...
The uptake of particles by actin-powered invagination of the plasma membrane is common to protozoa and to phagocytes involved in the immune response of higher organisms. The question addressed here is how a ph...
The cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitor p27Kip1 is downregulated in a majority of human cancers due to ectopic proteolysis by the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. The expression of p27 is subject to multiple mec...
Gut homeostasis is central to whole organism health, and its disruption is associated with a broad range of pathologies. Following damage, complex physiological events are required in the gut to maintain prope...
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is relatively common in plant mitochondrial genomes but the mechanisms, extent and consequences of transfer remain largely unknown. Previous results indicate that parasitic plant...
The zebrafish is proving to be an extremely versatile new experimental model for unraveling the mysteries of innate immunity and has considerable promise as a system for the identification of novel modulators ...
Parasitic plants and their hosts have proven remarkably adept at exchanging fragments of mitochondrial DNA. Two recent studies provide important mechanistic insights into the pattern, process and consequences ...
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