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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...
The caspase family, which plays a central role in apoptosis in metazoans, has undergone an expansion in amphioxus, increasing to 45 members through domain recombination and shuffling.
The combination of molecular sequence data and bioinformatics has revolutionized phylogenetic inference over the past decade, vastly increasing the scope of the evolutionary trees that we are able to infer. A ...
Building the complex vertebrate nervous system involves the regulated production of neurons and glia while maintaining a progenitor cell population. Neurogenesis starts asynchronously in different regions of t...
Cells are highly complex and orderly machines, with defined shapes and a startling variety of internal organizations. Complex geometry is a feature of both free-living unicellular organisms and cells inside mu...
Fungal sexual reproductive modes have markedly high diversity and plasticity, and asexual species have been hypothesized to arise frequently from sexual fungal species. A recent study on the red yeasts provide...
Enormous molecular sequence data have been accumulated over the past several years and are still exponentially growing with the use of faster and cheaper sequencing techniques. There is high and widespread int...
Cell migration is essential during development and in human disease progression including cancer. Most cell migration studies concentrate on known or predicted components of migration pathways.
Peptide Recognition Domains (PRDs) are commonly found in signaling proteins. They mediate protein-protein interactions by recognizing and binding short motifs in their ligands. Although a great deal is known a...
Many previous studies have focused on understanding how midbrain dopamine neurons, which are implicated in many neurological conditions, are generated during embryogenesis. One of the remaining questions conce...
Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) are being increasingly recognized as important regulators of gene expression. A recent paper in Genome Biology reports the identification of a lncRNA family in Plasmodium falciparum,...
The preimplantation embryo is sensitive to culture conditions in vitro and poor maternal diet in vivo. Such environmental perturbations can have long-lasting detrimental consequences for offspring health and phys...
Ire1 is a signal transduction protein in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane that serves to adjust the protein-folding capacity of the ER according to the needs of the cell. Ire1 signals, in a transcriptio...
The unfolded protein response (UPR) controls the protein folding capacity of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Central to this signaling pathway is the ER-resident bifunctional transmembrane kinase/endoribonucle...
Brains increase the survival value of organisms by being robust and fault tolerant. That is, brain circuits continue to operate as the organism needs, even when the circuit properties are significantly perturb...
Cytolytic cells of the immune system destroy pathogen-infected cells by polarised exocytosis of secretory lysosomes containing the pore-forming protein perforin. Precise delivery of this lethal hit is essentia...
Understanding how biodiversity is shaped through time is a fundamental question in biology. Even though tropical rain forests (TRF) represent the most diverse terrestrial biomes on the planet, the timing, loca...
Forming synaptic connections of the appropriate strength between specific neurons is crucial for constructing neural circuits to control behavior. A recent paper in Neural Development describes the use of a synap...
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