-
[
The New York Times,
1997]
His tall figure bent over a computer screen in his laboratory at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Gary Ruvkun rummages through a distant genetic data base for matches to a gene he believes is involved in diabetes. ?You learn how to read these as they are ratcheting by,? he says, while lines of data streak up his screen. ?I think MTV is good training.?
-
[
Autophagy,
2024]
Professor Richard (Rick) Morimoto is the Bill and Gayle Cook Professor of Biology and Director of the Rice Institute for Biomedical Research at Northwestern University. He has made foundational contributions to our understanding of how cells respond to various stresses, and the role played in those responses by chaperones. Working across a variety of experimental models, from <i>C</i>. <i>elegans</i> to human neuronal cells, he has identified a number of important molecular components that sense and respond to stress, and he has dissected how stress alters cellular and organismal physiology. Together with colleagues, Professor Morimoto has coined the term "proteostasis" to signify the homeostatic control of protein expression and function, and in recent years he has been one of the leaders of a consortium trying to understand proteostasis in healthy and disease states. I took the opportunity to talk with Professor Morimoto about proteostasis in general, the aims of the consortium, and how autophagy is playing an important role in their research effort.
-
[
Journal of Helminthology,
1955]
Osche (1952) has recently published a sorely needed, comprehensive revision of the genus Rhabditis Dujardin [1844] (sensu lato) including detailed study of certain features of the cephalic end, especially of the stoma or mouth cavity. For some time to come his study will surely be the point of departure for morpholigical and systematic work on the group. On the basis principally of the structure of the metastom (a subdivision of the stoma) and of the esophagus, he recognizes some eight subgenera in the genus Rhabditis, which are as follows: Rhabditis Dujardin [1844] (sensu stricto), Choriorhabditis Osche, 1952, Telorhabditis Osche, 1952, Caenorhabditis Osche, 1952, Mesorhabditis Osche, 1952, Teratorhabditis Oshce, 1952, Protorhabditis Osche, 1952, and Parasitorhabditis Fuch, 1937. For all of these save the last he lists the species recognized by him. For a revision of Parasitorhabditis he refers to an unpublished manuscript by Ruhm.....
-
[
Trends in Ecology & Evolution,
1999]
In a recent TREE news & comment, Gadagkar made some useful comments on LaMunyon and Ward's interesting study on sexual reproduction in nematodes. I think, however, that he - and LaMunyon and Ward - have confused the benefits of sex for species or demes with those for individuals or genes.
-
[
Genome Biol,
2000]
SUMMARY: The F-box is a protein motif of approximately 50 amino acids that functions as a site of protein-protein interaction. F-box proteins were first characterized as components of SCF ubiquitin-ligase complexes (named after their main components, Skp I, Cullin, and an F-box protein), in which they bind substrates for ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis. The F-box motif links the F-box protein to other components of the SCF complex by binding the core SCF component Skp I. F-box proteins have more recently been discovered to function in non-SCF protein complexes in a variety of cellular functions. There are 11 F-box proteins in budding yeast, 326 predicted in Caenorhabditis elegans, 22 in Drosophila, and at least 38 in humans. F-box proteins often include additional carboxy-terminal motifs capable of protein-protein interaction; the most common secondary motifs in yeast and human F-box proteins are WD repeats and leucine-rich repeats, both of which have been found to bind phosphorylated substrates to the SCF complex. The majority of F-box proteins have other associated motifs, and the functions of most of these proteins have not yet been defined.
-
Connell M, Anderson K, Ainscough R, Blair D, Durbin RM, Dear S, Berks M, Craxton M, Waterston RH, Du Z, Cooper JA, Coulson AR
[
Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol,
1993]
he C. elegans genome project is part of a larger effort to understand how the information encoded in its DNA specifies the biology of this small nematode worm...In this paper we review the construction of the physical map and present a preliminary report on the pilot sequencing project. A more detailed report will be published shortly.
-
[
Cell Death and Differentiation,
2004]
The award of the 2002 Nobel Prize to Brenner, Sulston, and Horvitz was one of the most satisfying I can recall, recognizing as it did the long sought meaningful conjunction of developmental biology with cancer research. Cancer is the ultimate derangement of growth and differentiation, affecting as it does the placenta, the embryo, the fetus, the infant, the child, the adolescent, and the adult of any age. Little wonder then that developmental biologists (embryologists in bygone days) have contributed so much to our understanding of cancer's origin. Indeed, the first coherent view of cancer was painted by the great embryologist Theodor Boveri in his heuristic volume of 1914 on the origin of cancer. Having observed the developmental aberrations of sea urchin embryos that can follow upon abnormalities of centrosome number and of the segregation of chromosomes, he associated causally the already known phenomenon of centrosome abnormalities of cancer with the latter's histopathology. He further posited that such pathology could be attributed to a single chromosomally aberrant cell.
-
[
J Biosci,
2018]
Advanced fluorescence techniques, commonly known as the F-techniques, measure the kinetics and the interactions of biomolecules with high sensitivity and spatiotemporal resolution. Applications of the F-techniques, which were initially limited to cells, were further extended to study in vivo protein organization and dynamics in whole organisms. The integration of F-techniques with multi-photon microscopy and light-sheet microscopy widened their applications in the field of developmental biology. It became possible to penetrate the thick tissues of living organisms and obtain good signal-to-noise ratio with reduced photo-induced toxicity. In this review, we discuss the principle and the applications of the three most commonly used F-techniques in developmental biology: Fluorescence Recovery After Photo-bleaching (FRAP), Fo rster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), and Fluorescence Correlation and Cross-Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS and FCCS).
-
[
J Leukoc Biol,
1996]
The recognition that apoptosis is regulated by an evolutionarily conserved set of polypeptides from the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to humans suggests that a conserved set of biochemical mechanisms may also he involved in the response. Work from a number of independent laboratories suggests that alterations in cytosolic Ca2+ homeostasis represent one such candidate mechanism, and molecular targets for Ca2+ are now being identified. This review will summarize what is known about the role of Ca2+ in the regulation of apoptosis and discuss how Ca2+ might interact with some of the other biochemical signals implicated in cell death.
-
[
Trends in Ecology & Evolution,
1999]
In a recent TREE news & comment, Gadagkar made some useful comments on LaMunyon and Ward's interesting study on sexual reproduction in nematodes. I think, however, that he - and LaMunyon and Ward - have confused the benefits of sex for species or demes with those for individuals or genes. For females and hermaphrodites (but not for species or demes), the twofold cost of sexual reproduction or producing males' in Maynard Smith's sense implies the cost of producing offspring that have only half of the hermaphrodite parent's genome set - not directly that of producing males. An offspring of a hermaphrodite Caenorhabditis briggsae inherits half, not more, of each parental genome set. The hermaphrodite parent still pays the two fold cost of sexual reproduction in the same way as