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Summary of recent advancesA family of small molecules called ascarosides act as pheromones to control multiple behaviors in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans....Full Text Available

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A report on the 16th International Caenorhabditis elegans Meeting, Los Angeles, USA, 27 June-1 July 2007.

UK PubMed Central (United Kingdom)

The nuo-6 and isp-1 genes of C. elegans encode, respectively, subunits of complex I and III of the mitochondrial respiratory chain. Partial loss-of-function...Full Text Available

UK PubMed Central (United Kingdom)

A common property of aging in all animals is that chronologically and genetically identical individuals age at different rates. To unveil mechanisms that influence aging variability, we identified markers...Full Text Available

UK PubMed Central (United Kingdom)

Although acetylated α-tubulin is known to be a marker of stable microtubules in neurons, precise factors that regulate α-tubulin acetylation are, to date, largely unknown. Therefore,...Full Text Available

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Stem cells are expected to play a key role in the development and maintenance of organisms, and hold great therapeutic promises. However, a number of questions must be answered to achieve an...Full Text Available

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Cross-resistance to cefoxitin (FOX), chloramphenicol (CMP), and quinolones (nalidixic acid [NAL]) related to a putative efflux system overexpression has recently been reported for Klebsiella...Full Text Available

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X-linked sideroblastic anemia with ataxia (XLSA/A) is a rare inherited disorder characterized by mild anemia and ataxia. XLSA/A is caused by mutations in the ABCB7 gene, which encodes...Full Text Available

UK PubMed Central (United Kingdom)

We review the application of C. elegans as a model system to understand key aspects of stem cell biology. The only bona fide stem cells in C. elegans...Full Text Available

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BackgroundCharacterization of the innate immune repertoire of extant cnidarians is of both fundamental and applied interest - it not only provides insights into the basic immunological...Full Text Available

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Innate immune responses are regulated by microorganisms and cell death, as well as by a third class of stress signal from the nervous and endocrine systems. The innate immune system also feeds back, through the production of cytokines, to regulate the function of the central nervous system (CNS), and this has effects on behaviour. These signals provide an extrinsic regulatory circuit that links physiological, social and environmental conditions, as perceived by the CNS, with transcriptional 'decision-making' in leukocytes. CNS-mediated regulation of innate immune responses optimizes total organism fitness and provides new opportunities for therapeutic control of chronic infectious, inflammatory and neuropsychiatric diseases.

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Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder that leads to the development of a number of complications. The etiology of each diabetic complication is undoubtedly multifactorial. We will focus...Full Text Available

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BackgroundMutations that impair mitochondrial functioning are associated with a variety of metabolic and age-related disorders. A barrier to rigorous tests of the role of mitochondrial...Full Text Available

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SummaryThe life span of C. elegans can be increased via reduced function of the mitochondria; however, the extent to which mitochondrial alteration in a single,...Full Text Available

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Many lifespan-modulating genes are involved in either generation of oxidative substrates and end-products, or their detoxification and removal. Among such metabolites, only lipoperoxides have the ability...Full Text Available

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DYF-13, originally identified in C. elegans within a collection of dye-filling chemosensory mutants, is one of several proteins that have been classified as putatively involved...Full Text Available

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BackgroundProteins may evolve through the recruitment and modification of discrete domains, and in many cases, protein action can be dissected at the domain level. PDZ domains are...Full Text Available

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Monogenic autoinflammatory diseases encompass a distinct and growing clinical entity of multisystem inflammatory diseases with known genetic defects in the innate immune system. The diseases...Full Text Available

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Surfactant protein A (SP-A), first identified as a component of the lung surfactant system, is now recognized to be an important contributor to host defence mechanisms. SP-A can facilitate phagocytosis...Full Text Available

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The objective of this study was to determine if inflammatory tolerance and enhancement of innate immune function could be induced by the gram-positive cell wall component peptidoglycan (PGN)....Full Text Available

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Chemokine receptors control leukocyte chemotaxis and cell-cell communication but have also been associated with pathogen entry. GPR33, an orphan member of the chemokine-like receptor family,...Full Text Available

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Purpose of reviewSevere congenital neutropenia (SCN) is a primary immunodeficiency in which lack of neutrophils causes inadequate innate immune host response to bacterial...Full Text Available

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BackgroundMammalian antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are effectors of the innate immune response. A multitude of signals coming from pathways of mammalian pathogen/pattern recognition...Full Text Available

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Macrophages are cells of the immune system that protect organisms against invading pathogens by fulfilling critical roles in innate and adaptive immunity and inflammation. They originate from circulating...Full Text Available

British Library Electronic Table of Contents (United Kingdom)

Mutations or multiplications in a-synuclein gene cause familial forms of Parkinson disease or dementia with Lewy bodies (LB), and the deposition of wild-type a-synuclein as LB occurs as a hallmark lesion of these disorders, collectively referred to as synucleinopathies, implicating a-synuclein in the pathogenesis of synucleinopathy. To identify modifier genes of a-synuclein-induced neurotoxicity, we conducted an RNAi screen in transgenic C. elegans (Tg worms) that overexpress human a-synuclein in a pan-neuronal manner. To enhance the RNAi effect in neurons, we crossed a-synuclein Tg worms with an RNAi-enhanced mutant eri-1 strain. We tested RNAi of 1673 genes related to nervous system or synaptic functions, and identified 10 genes that, upon knockdown, caused severe growth/motor abnormalit...

British Library Electronic Table of Contents (United Kingdom)

Pneumonia caused by Mannheimia haemolytica is an important disease of domestic sheep (DS, Ovis aries) and cattle (BO). M. haemolytica is a normal commensal of the upper respiratory tract in ruminants, but during stress and viral infection it breaches the host innate mucosal defense and descents into lungs causing fibrinous pleuropneumonia. Leukotoxin (Lkt) produced by M. haemolytica is cytolytic to all subsets of ruminant leukocytes. Earlier, we and others have shown that DS and BO LFA-1 (CD11a/CD18) and Mac-1 (CD11b/CD18) can mediate Lkt-induced cytolysis. It is not clear whether CR4 (CD11c/CD18), which is involved in chemotaxis, phagocytosis and regulates host immune response can also mediate Lkt-induced cytolysis in ruminants. The host innate immune response to M. haemolytica is poorly ...

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The long pentraxin PTX3 has multiple roles in innate immunity. For example, PTX3 regulates C1q binding to pathogens and dead cells and regulates their uptake by phagocytes. It also inhibits P-selectin-mediated...Full Text Available

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Abstract In his, -Descartes' Ontology of Thought-, Alan Nelson presents, on Descartes' behalf, a compositional theory of mental representation according to which the content of any mental representation is either simple or is entirely constituted by a combination of innate simples. Here the simples are our ideas of God, thought, extension, and union. My objection will be that it is simply ludicrous to think that any four simples are adequate to the task of combining to constitute all of human thought, and that the simples God, thought, extension, and union are particularly ill suited to it.

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Emerging evidence suggests that E3 ligases play critical roles in diverse biological processes, including innate immune responses in plants. However, the mechanism of the E3 ligase involvement in plant innate immunity is unclear. We report that a rice gene, OsBBI1, encoding a RING finger protein with E3 ligase activity, mediates broad-spectrum disease resistance. The expression of OsBBI1 was induced by rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, as well as chemical inducers, benzothiadiazole and salicylic acid. Biochemical analysis revealed that OsBBI1 protein possesses E3 ubiquitin ligase activity in vitro. Genetic analysis revealed that the loss of OsBBI1 function in a Tos17-insertion line increased susceptibility, while the overexpression of OsBBI1 in transgenic plants conferred enhanced resi...

British Library Electronic Table of Contents (United Kingdom)

AbstractBackground: A defective innate immune response may contribute to the pathogenesis of Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Employing a global gene expression analysis, this study was aimed at identifying specifically regulated genes within the epithelial compartment in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Methods: The epithelial fraction of human ileal mucosa samples from surgical specimens was obtained by laser microdissection. Gene expression was examined by global expression profiling (n = 18, Affymetrix), quantitative reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) (n = 35), immunoblot analysis (n = 9), and immunohistochemistry (n = 25). Results: Global expression profiling revealed a pronounced downregulation of the retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) with...

British Library Electronic Table of Contents (United Kingdom)

Abstract Ovipositing females of the black swallowtail butterfly, Papilio polyxenes Fabricius (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae: Papilioninae), have an innate response to contact chemical cues, but it was not known how naive females would respond to volatile host plant chemicals. Naive and experienced females were tested in a free-flight experiment using model plants and volatile extracts from two hosts, carrot [Daucus carota L. (Apiaceae)] and poison hemlock [Conium maculatum L. (Apiaceae)], and one non-host, fava bean [Vicia faba L. (Fabaceae)]. Naive females responded to both host plant extracts with more approaches and landings than to non-host extracts, with poison hemlock receiving more responses than carrot. Females experienced with one of the two host plants also approached and landed freq...

Science.gov (United States)

We hypothesize that the mushroom-derived active compound may be a potential strategy for increasing survival in response to influenza virus (H1N1) infection through the stimulation of host innate immune response. The validity of the hypothesis can be tested by immune response to influenza infection as seen through survival percentage, virus clearance, weight loss, natural killer cell cytotoxicity, Tumor Necrosis Factor-? (TNF-?) and Interferon-gamma (IFN-?) levels, lytic efficiency in the spleens of mice and inducible nitric oxide synthase mRNA expressions in RAW 264.7 murine macrophage cells. The hypothesis may improve people's quality of life, reduce the medical cost of our healthcare system and eliminate people's fears of influenza outbreak. PMID:21660092

Science.gov (United States)

We describe an efficient procedure for proving stabilization of biological systems modeled as qualitative networks or genetic regulatory networks. For scalability, our procedure uses modular proof techniques, where state-space exploration is applied only locally to small pieces of the system rather than the entire system as a whole. Our procedure exploits the observation that, in practice, the form of modular proofs can be restricted to a very limited set. For completeness, our technique falls back on a non-compositional counterexample search. Using our new procedure, we have solved a number of challenging published examples, including: a 3-D model of the mammalian epidermis; a model of metabolic networks operating in type-2 diabetes; a model of fate determination of vulval precursor cells in the C. elegans worm; and a model of pair-rule regulation during segmentation in the Drosophila embryo. Our results show many orders of magnitude speedup in cases where ...

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Apoptosis is a pattern of cell death involving nuclear pycnosis, cytoplasmic condensation, and karyorrhexis. Apoptosis induced by continuous irradiation with gamma rays (externally given by a 137Cs source) or with beta rays (from tritiated water injected ip) was quantified in the crypts of two portions of mouse bowel, the small intestine and descending colon. The time-course change in the incidence of apoptosis after each type of radiation could be explained on the basis of the innate circadian rhythm of the cells susceptible to apoptotic death and of the excretion of tritiated water (HTO) from the body. For 6-h continuous gamma irradiation at various dose rates (0.6-480 mGy/h) and for 6 h after injection of HTO of various radioactivities (0.15-150 GBq per kg body wt), the relationships between dose and incidence of apoptosis were obtained. Survival curves were then constructed from the curves for dose vs incidence of apoptosis. For the calculation of the absorbed ...

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

1 - Description of program or function: Format: MATXS; Number of groups: 175 neutron-, 42 photon-groups; 176 Nuclides: 1-H-1, 1-H-2, 1-H-3, 2-He-3, 2-He-4, 3-Li-6, 3-Li-7, 4-Be-9, 5-B-10, 5-B-11, 6-C- nat., 7-N-14, 7-N-15, 8-O-16, 8-O-17, 9-F-19, 11-Na-23, 12-Mg-nat., 13-Al-27, 14-Si-nat., 14-Si-28, 14-Si-29, 14-Si-30, 15-P-31, 16-S-32, 17-Cl-nat., 19-K-nat., 20-Ca-nat., 21-Sc-45, 22-Ti-nat., 23-V-nat., 24-Cr-50, 24-Cr-52, 24-Cr-53, 24-Cr-54, 25-Mn-25, 26-Fe-54, 26-Fe-56, 26-Fe-57, 26-Fe-58, 27-Co-59, 28-Ni-58, 28-Ni-60, 28-Ni-61, 28-Ni-62, 28-Ni-64, 29-Cu-63, 29-Cu-65, 31-Ga-nat., 39-Y-89, 40-Zr-nat., 40-Zr-90, 40-Zr-91, 40-Zr-92, 40-Zr-94, 40-Zr-96, 41-Nb-93, 42-Mo-nat., 46-Pd-102, 46-Pd-104, 46-Pd-105, 46-Pd-106, 46-Pd-108, 46-Pd-110, 47-Ag-107, 47-Ag-109, 48-Cd-106, 48-Cd-108, 48-Cd-110, 48-Cd-112, 48-Cd-113, 48-Cd-114, 48-Cd-116, 49-In-nat., 53-I-127, 54-Xe-124, 54-Xe-126, 54-Xe-128, 54-Xe-129, 54-Xe-130, 54-Xe-131, 54-Xe-132, 54-Xe-134, 54-Xe-136, 55-Cs-133, ...