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Genome and proteome data from Hydra magnipapillata have opened the way for the molecular analysis of an ancient nervous system, which includes stinging cells, an unusual neurosensory and neurosecretory cell type....
Cnidocytes, the eponymous cell type of the Cnidaria, facilitate both sensory and secretory functions and are among the most complex animal cell types known. In addition to their structural complexity, cnidocyt...
The protein secretory pathway must process a wide assortment of native proteins for eukaryotic cells to function. As well, recombinant protein secretion is used extensively to produce many biologics and indust...
The recent introduction of in vivo lineage-tracing techniques using fluorescently labeled cells challenged the long-standing view that complete dedifferentiation is a major force driving vertebrate tissue regener...
Hsp90 reveals phenotypic variation in the laboratory, but is Hsp90 depletion important in the wild? Recent work from Chen and Wagner in BMC Evolutionary Biology has discovered a naturally occurring Drosophila all...
The up-dated species level phylogeny for the carnivores using a supertree approach provides new insights into the evolutionary origin and relationships of carnivores. While the gain in biological knowledge is ...
Although it has proven to be an important foundation for investigations of carnivoran ecology, biology and evolution, the complete species-level supertree for Carnivora of Bininda-Emonds et al. is showing its age...
Recent findings indicate that several insect lineages receive protection against particular natural enemies through infection with heritable symbionts, but little is yet known about whether enemies are able to...
Often considered an 'aging' hormone due to its role in accelerating such developmental processes as ripening, senescence, and abscission, the plant hormone ethylene also regulates many aspects of growth and de...
The embryonic temporal regulator FUSCA3 (FUS3) plays major roles in the establishment of embryonic leaf identity and the regulation of developmental timing. Loss-of-function mutations of this B3 domain transcript...
Microglia are the abundant, resident myeloid cells of the central nervous system (CNS) that become rapidly activated in response to injury or inflammation. While most studies of microglia focus on this phenome...
Protein kinase CK2 is a pleiotropic serine/threonine protein kinase with hundreds of reported substrates, and plays an important role in a number of cellular processes. The cellular functions of Plasmodium falcip...
During nerve growth, cytoplasmic vesicles add new membrane preferentially to the growth cone located at the distal tip of extending axons. Growth cone membrane is also retrieved locally, and asymmetric retriev...
Alteration in gene expression resulting from allopolyploidization is a prominent feature in plants, but its spectrum and extent are not fully known. Common wheat (Triticum aestivum) was formed via allohexaploidiz...
Protein conformational dynamics simultaneously allow promiscuity and specificity in binding. The multiple conformations of the free EphA4 ligand-binding domain observed in two new EphA4 crystal structures prov...
Many trypanosomatid protozoa are important human or animal pathogens. The well defined morphology and precisely choreographed division of trypanosomatid cells makes morphological analysis a powerful tool for a...
Contradicting the prejudice that endosymbiosis is a rare phenomenon, HusnÃk and co-workers show in BMC Biology that bacterial endosymbiosis has occured several times independently during insect evolution. Rigorou...
The bending of cell sheets plays a major role in multicellular embryonic morphogenesis. Recent advances are leading to a deeper understanding of how the biophysical properties and the force-producing behaviors...
Epithelial folding is a common morphogenetic process during the development of multicellular organisms. In metazoans, the biological and biomechanical processes that underlie such three-dimensional (3D) develo...
The close association between hematopoietic and endothelial cells during embryonic development led to the proposal that they may originate from a common ancestor - the hemangioblast. Due to a lack of unique sp...
The bacterial family Enterobacteriaceae gave rise to a variety of symbiotic forms, from the loosely associated commensals, often designated as secondary (S) symbionts, to obligate mutualists, called primary (P...
The original article was published in BMC Biology 2010 8:149
The lipid phosphatidic acid (PA) has important roles in cell signaling and metabolic regulation in all organisms. New evidence indicates that PA also has an unprecedented role as a pH biosensor, coupling chang...
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common, highly invasive malignant tumor associated with a high mortality rate. We previously reported that the aberrant expression of Snail via activation of reactive oxygen...
Chemotropic factors in the extracellular microenvironment guide nerve growth by acting on the growth cone located at the tip of extending axons. Growth cone extension requires the coordination of cytoskeleton-...
Camouflage patterns that hinder detection and/or recognition by antagonists are widely studied in both human and animal contexts. Patterns of contrasting stripes that purportedly degrade an observer's ability ...
Transcription factor binding to DNA requires both an appropriate binding element and suitably open chromatin, which together help to define regulatory elements within the genome. Current methods of identifying...
A cold night can follow a hot day, and because they cannot move, plants subjected to such temperature fluctuations must acclimate on the basis mainly of pre-existing proteins. Zhang et al. report in a paper in BM...
Progress is being made in schizophrenia genomics, suggesting that this complex brain disorder involves rare, moderate to high-risk mutations and the cumulative impact of small genetic effects, coupled with env...
The number of individual cases of psychiatric disorders that can be ascribed to identified, rare, single mutations is increasing with great rapidity. Such mutations can be recapitulated in mice to generate ani...
Insulin-producing beta cells emerge during pancreas development in two sequential waves. Recently described later-forming beta cells in zebrafish show high similarity to second wave mammalian beta cells in dev...
In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the essential small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) protease Ulp1 is responsible for both removing SUMO/Smt3 from specific target proteins and for processing precursor SUMO i...
The focal adhesion protein p130Cas (Cas) activates multiple intracellular signaling pathways upon integrin or growth factor receptor ligation. Full-length Cas frequently promotes cell survival and migration, w...
Current interest in proteasome inhibitors for cancer therapy has stimulated considerable research efforts to identify the molecular pathway to their cytotoxicity with a view to identifying the mechanisms of se...
This review discusses the many roles atomistic computer simulations of macromolecular (for example, protein) receptors and their associated small-molecule ligands can play in drug discovery, including the iden...
The uptake of drugs into cells has traditionally been considered to be predominantly via passive diffusion through the bilayer portion of the cell membrane. The recent recognition that drug uptake is mostly ca...
The elevated metabolic requirements of cancer cells reflect their rapid growth and proliferation and are met through mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes that reprogram cellular processes. For exa...
Rule-based modeling has become a powerful approach for modeling intracellular networks, which are characterized by rich molecular diversity. Truly comprehensive models of cell behavior, however, must address s...
Transposable elements are best interpreted as genomic parasites, proliferating in genomes through their over-replication relative to the rest of the genome. A new study examining correlations across Drosophila sp...
The axon initial segment (AIS) plays a crucial role: it is the site where neurons initiate their electrical outputs. Its composition in terms of voltage-gated sodium (Nav) and voltage-gated potassium (Kv) chan...
It had been long assumed that almost all insertions of mobile DNA elements occurred during germ-cell development rather than in somatic-cell development, but solid evidence for transposition in somatic cells i...
Genetic studies in Drosophila melanogaster reveal an important role for Myc in controlling growth. Similar studies have also shown how components of the insulin and target of rapamycin (TOR) pathways are key regu...
The mitochondrial genome of higher plants is unusually dynamic, with recombination and nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) activities producing variability in size and organization. Plant mitochondrial DNA also g...
The mitochondrial genome of plants is-in every respect and for yet unclear reasons-very different from the well-studied one of animals. Thanks to next-generation sequencing technologies, Davila et al. precisely c...
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