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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...
Habitat variation strongly influences the evolution of developmentally flexible traits, and may drive speciation and diversification. The plethodontid salamander Eurycea tynerensis is endemic to the geologically ...
Soon after the first algorithms for RNA folding became available, it was recognised that the prediction of only one energetically optimal structure is insufficient to achieve reliable results. An in-depth anal...
Runx proteins are developmentally important metazoan transcription factors that form a heterodimeric complex with the non-homologous protein Core Binding Factor β (CBFβ). CBFβ allosterically enhances Runx DNA ...
The phylum Chlorophyta contains the majority of the green algae and is divided into four classes. The basal position of the Prasinophyceae has been well documented, but the divergence order of the Ulvophyceae,...
Stem cells divide to reproduce themselves and produce differentiated progeny. A fundamental problem in human biology has been the inability to measure how often stem cells divide. Although it is impossible to ...
The provision of stress resistance diverts resources from development and reproduction and must therefore be tightly regulated. In Caenorhabditis elegans, the switch to increased stress resistance to promote surv...
Sec8 is highly expressed in mammalian nervous systems and has been proposed to play a role in several aspects of neural development and function, including neurite outgrowth, calcium-dependent neurotransmitter...
Toxoplasma gondii gives rise to toxoplasmosis, among the most prevalent parasitic diseases of animals and man. Transformation of the tachzyoite stage into the latent bradyzoite-cyst form underlies chronic diseas...
Myelination requires precise control of oligodendrocyte morphology and myelin generation at each of the axons contacted by an individual cell. This control must involve the integration of extracellular cues, s...
Recent analysis of the human and mouse genomes has shown that a substantial proportion of protein coding genes and cis-regulatory elements contain transposable element (TE) sequences, implicating TE domestication...
Signaling by the Wnt family of secreted glycoproteins through their receptors, the frizzled (Fz) family of seven-pass transmembrane proteins, is critical for numerous cell fate and tissue polarity decisions du...
The Streptophyta comprise all land plants and six monophyletic groups of charophycean green algae. Phylogenetic analyses of four genes from three cellular compartments support the following branching order for...
Compartmentalization is a key feature of eukaryotic cells, but its evolution remains poorly understood. GTPases are the oldest enzymes that use nucleotides as substrates and they participate in a wide range of...
Rice is an important staple food and, with the smallest cereal genome, serves as a reference species for studies on the evolution of cereals and other grasses. Therefore, decoding its entire genome will be a p...
Regular exercise reduces cardiovascular and metabolic disease partly through improved aerobic fitness. The determinants of exercise-induced gains in aerobic fitness in humans are not known. We have demonstrate...
Runx transcription factors play critical roles in the developmental control of cell fate and contribute variously as oncoproteins and tumor suppressors to leukemia and other cancers. To discover fundamental Ru...
Echolocating bats emit vocalizations that can be classified either as echolocation calls or communication calls. Neural control of both types of calls must govern the same pool of motoneurons responsible for v...
Given the complexity of higher organisms, the number of genes encoded by their genomes is surprisingly small. Tissue specific regulation of expression and splicing are major factors enhancing the number of the...
The role of centrioles in mitotic spindle function remains unclear. One approach to investigate mitotic centriole function is to ask whether mutation of centriole-associated proteins can cause genomic instabil...
PCI/MPN domain protein complexes comprise the 19S proteasome lid, the COP9 signalosome (CSN), and eukaryotic translation initiation factor 3 (eIF3). The eIF3 complex is thought to be composed of essential core...
The TyrA protein family includes members that catalyze two dehydrogenase reactions in distinct pathways leading to L-tyrosine and a third reaction that is not part of tyrosine biosynthesis. Family members shar...
Flowering plant development is wholly reliant on growth from meristems, which contain totipotent cells that give rise to all post-embryonic organs in the plant. Plants are uniquely able to alter their developm...
A key event in plant morphogenesis is the establishment of a division plane. A plant-specific microtubular preprophase band (PPB) accurately predicts the line of cell division, whereas the phragmoplast, anothe...
In lakes with a deep-water algal maximum, herbivorous zooplankton are faced with a trade-off between high temperature but low food availability in the surface layers and low temperature but sufficient food in ...
The condition of many marine mammals varies with fluctuations in productivity and food supply in the ocean basin where they forage. Prey is impacted by physical environmental variables such as cyclic warming t...
Parasites exploit sophisticated strategies to evade host immunity that require both adaptation of existing genes and evolution of new gene families. We have addressed this question by testing the immunological...
Since the initial publication of its complete genome sequence, Arabidopsis thaliana has become more important than ever as a model for plant research. However, the initial genome annotation was submitted by multi...
It is a matter of ongoing debate whether a universal species concept is possible for bacteria. Indeed, it is not clear whether closely related isolates of bacteria typically form discrete genotypic clusters th...
Because "laws of nature" do not exist in ecology, much of the foundations of community ecology rely on broad statistical generalisations. One of the strongest generalisations is the positive relationship betwe...
Excessive sequential stereotypy of behavioral patterns (sequential super-stereotypy) in Tourette's syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is thought to involve dysfunction in nigrostriatal dopamine s...
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