2018 December - 79 articles
Metabolic resistance to insecticides threatens malaria control. However, little is known about its fitness cost in field populations of malaria vectors, thus limiting the design of suitable resistance management strategies. Here, we assessed the asso...
While shed hairs are one of the most commonly encountered evidence types, they are among the most limited in terms of DNA quantity and quality. As a result, nuclear DNA short tandem repeat (STR) profiling is generally unsuccessful and DNA testing of...
An improved approach for predicting the risk for incident coronary heart disease (CHD) could lead to substantial improvements in cardiovascular health. Previously, we have shown that genetic and epigenetic loci could predict CHD status more sensitive...
Ribose 2′-O-methylation is certainly one of the most common RNA modifications found in almost any type of cellular RNA. It decorates transfer RNAs (tRNAs), ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs), small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs) (and most probably small nucleolar R...
Inherited retinal degenerations are the leading cause of blindness in the working population. X-linked retinitis pigmentosa (XLRP), caused by mutations in the Retinitis pigmentosa GTPase regulator (RPGR) gene is one of the more severe forms, and fema...
Type 1 (T1D) and type 2 (T2D) diabetes are triggered by a combination of environmental and/or genetic factors. Maf transcription factors regulate pancreatic beta (β)-cell function, and have also been implicated in the regulation of immunomodulat...
The domestication and subsequent genetic improvement of wheat led to the development of large-seeded cultivated wheat species relative to their smaller-seeded wild progenitors. While increased grain weight (GW) continues to be an important goal of ma...
Genus Epimedium consists of approximately 50 species in China, and more than half of them possess medicinal properties. The high similarity of species’ morphological characteristics complicates the identification accuracy, leading to potential...
Auxin is a major hormone which plays crucial roles in instructing virtually all developmental programs of plants. Its signaling depends primarily on its perception by four partially redundant receptors of the TIR1/AFB2 clade (TAARs), which subsequent...
Cold storage is the primary preservation method of postharvest loquat fruits. However, cold storage also results in many chilling injury physiological disorders called lignification, which decreases the quality and economic value of the fruits. Few s...
DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) jeopardize genome integrity and can—when repaired unfaithfully—give rise to structural rearrangements associated with cancer. Exogenous agents such as ionizing radiation or chemotherapy can invoke DSBs, but...
In the nucleus of each cell, the DNA is wrapped around histone octamers, forming the so-called “nucleosomal core particles”. The histones undergo various modifications that influence chromatin structure and function, including methylation...
Replication stress results in various forms of aberrant replication intermediates that need to be resolved for faithful chromosome segregation. Structure-specific endonucleases (SSEs) recognize DNA secondary structures rather than primary sequences a...
Copper (Cu) is involved in fundamental biological processes for plant growth and development. However, Cu excess is harmful to plants. Thus, Cu in plant tissues must be tightly regulated. In this study, we found that the peanut Yellow Stripe-Like fam...
Artificial intelligence research received more and more attention nowadays. Neural Evolution (NE) is one very important branch of AI, which waves the power of evolutionary algorithms to generate Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). How to use the evolu...
Adenosine to inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing is a highly conserved regulatory process carried out by adenosine-deaminases (ADARs) on double-stranded RNA (dsRNAs). Although a considerable fraction of the transcriptome is edited, the function of most edit...
Studies are increasingly showing that metabolic and circadian (~24 h) pathways are strongly interconnected, with the circadian system regulating the metabolic state of the cell, and metabolic products feeding back to entrain the oscillator. In plants...
The accurate repair of DNA is critical for genome stability and cancer prevention. DNA double-strand breaks are one of the most toxic lesions; however, they can be repaired using homologous recombination. Homologous recombination is a high-fidelity D...
Although transposon-mediated enhancer trapping (ET) is successfully applied in diverse models, the efficiency of various transposon systems varies significantly, and little information is available regarding efficiency of enhancer trapping by various...
The chronic inflammatory microenvironment and immune cell dysfunction have been described as critical components for gastric tumor initiation and progression. The diffuse subtype is related to poor clinical outcomes, pronounced inflammation, and the...
Accurate duplication and transmission of identical genetic information into offspring cells lies at the heart of a cell division cycle. During the last stage of cellular division, namely mitosis, the fully replicated DNA molecules are condensed into...
Coping with daily and seasonal temperature fluctuations is a key adaptive process for species to colonize temperate regions all over the globe. Over the past 18,000 years, the tropical species Drosophila ananassae expanded its home range from tropica...
The rapid accumulation of ancient human genomes from various areas and time periods potentially enables the expansion of studies of biodiversity, biogeography, forensics, population history, and epidemiology into past populations. However, most ancie...
DNA methylation, one of the major epigenetic mechanisms, plays critical roles in regulating gene expression, genomic stability and cell lineage commitment. The establishment and maintenance of DNA methylation in mammals is achieved by two groups of D...
Super-resolution microscopies, such as single molecule localization microscopy (SMLM), allow the visualization of biomolecules at the nanoscale. The requirement to observe molecules multiple times during an acquisition has pushed the field to explore...
Eukaryotic DNA replication occurs in the context of chromatin. Recent years have seen major advances in our understanding of histone supply, histone recycling and nascent histone incorporation during replication. Furthermore, much is now known about...
The circadian clock is an important endogenous timekeeper, helping plants to prepare for the periodic changes of light and darkness in their environment. The clockwork of this molecular timer is made up of clock proteins that regulate transcription o...
DNA methylation is an essential epigenetic mark in mammals. The proper distribution of this mark depends on accurate deposition and maintenance mechanisms, and underpins its functional role. This, in turn, depends on the precise recruitment and activ...
RNA modifications regulate the complex life of transcripts. An experimental approach called LAIC-seq was developed to characterize modification levels on a transcriptome-wide scale. In this method, the modified and unmodified molecules are separated...
Rediscovering species once thought to be extinct or on the edge of extinction is rare. Red wolves have been extinct along the American Gulf Coast since 1980, with their last populations found in coastal Louisiana and Texas. We report the rediscovery...
Gene expression divergence is an important evolutionary driving force for the retention of duplicate genes. In this study, we identified three CYP78A subfamily genes in soybean, GmCYP78A70, GmCYP78A57 and GmCYP78A72, which experienced different dupli...
The molecular mechanisms of translation are highly conserved in all organisms indicative of a single evolutionary origin. This includes the molecular interactions of tRNAs with their cognate aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, which must be precise to ensure...
Invasive fungal infections caused by Mucorales (mucormycosis) have increased worldwide. These life-threatening infections affect mainly, but not exclusively, immunocompromised patients, and are characterized by rapid progression, severe tissue damage...
DNA replication is an essential biochemical reaction in dividing cells that frequently stalls at damaged sites. Homologous/homeologous recombination (HR)-mediated template switch and translesion DNA synthesis (TLS)-mediated bypass processes release a...
Maintenance of an intact genome is essential for cellular and organismal homeostasis. The centromere is a specialized chromosomal locus required for faithful genome inheritance at each round of cell division. Human centromeres are composed of large t...
Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are abundant small non-coding RNAs that are crucially important for decoding genetic information. Besides fulfilling canonical roles as adaptor molecules during protein synthesis, tRNAs are also the source of a heterogeneous cla...
Among the various statistical methods for identifying gene–gene interactions in qualitative genome-wide association studies (GWAS), gene-based methods have recently grown in popularity because they confer advantages in both statistical power an...
Genetic factors play a critical role in the development of human diseases. Recently, several molecular genetic studies have provided multiple lines of evidence for a critical role of genetic factors in the expression of human bladder exstrophy-epispa...
B chromosomes (Bs) were discovered a century ago, and since then, most studies have focused on describing their distribution and abundance using traditional cytogenetics. Only recently have attempts been made to understand their structure and evoluti...
Accurate completion of genome duplication is threatened by multiple factors that hamper the advance and stability of the replication forks. Cells need to tolerate many of these blocking lesions to timely complete DNA replication, postponing their rep...
Self-contained structured domains of RNA sequences have often distinct molecular functions. Determining the boundaries of structured domains of a non-coding RNA (ncRNA) is needed for many ncRNA gene finder programs that predict RNA secondary structur...
Joubert syndrome is a group of rare disorders that stem from defects in a sensory organelle, the primary cilia. Affected patients often present with disorders involving multiple organ systems, including the brain, eyes, and kidneys. Common symptoms i...
The threatened eastern wolf is found predominantly in protected areas of central Ontario and has an evolutionary history obscured by interbreeding with coyotes and gray wolves, which challenges its conservation status and subsequent management. Here,...
Knowledge on diet composition of a species is an important step to unveil its ecology and guide conservation actions. This is especially important for species that inhabit remote areas within biodiversity hotspots, with little information about their...
Mammalian DNMT1 is mainly responsible for maintenance DNA methylation that is critical in maintaining stem cell pluripotency and controlling lineage specification during early embryonic development. A number of studies have demonstrated that DNMT1 is...
Ranking protein structure models is an elusive problem in bioinformatics. These models are evaluated on both the degree of similarity to the native structure and the folding pathway. Here, we simulated the use of the coarse-grained UNited RESidue (UN...
Plants have a lot of diversity in epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation in their natural populations or cultivars. Although many studies observing the epigenetic diversity within and among species have been reported, the mechanisms how the...
In Zambia, wild edible terrestrial orchids are used to produce a local delicacy called chikanda, which has become increasingly popular throughout the country. Commercialization puts orchid populations in Zambia and neighbouring countries at risk of o...
N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is known to occur in plant and animal messenger RNAs (mRNAs) since the 1970s. However, the scope and function of this modification remained un-explored till very recently. Since the beginning of this decade, owing to major te...
Brain-specific angiogenesis inhibitors (BAIs) 1, 2, and 3 are members of the adhesion G protein-coupled receptors, subfamily B, which share a conserved seven-transmembrane structure and an N-terminal extracellular domain. In cell- and animal-based st...
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