Fungal friends and foes

Friends or foes? Emerging insights from fungal interactions with plants

Fungi interact with plants in various ways, with each interaction giving rise to different alterations in both partners. While fungal pathogens have detrimental effects on plant physiology, mutualistic fungi augment host defence responses to pathogens and/or improve plant nutrient uptake. Tropic growth towards plant roots or stomata, mediated by chemical and topographical signals, has been desc...

Phytoestrogens. Friends or foes?

BioInformatics Pipeline Alternative Splicing Services (BIPASS) offer support to scientists interested in gathering information related to alternative splicing (AS) events. The service BIPAS–SpliceDB provides access to AS information that has been extracted a priori from various public databases and stored in a data warehouse. In contrast, the BIPAS– Align&Splice service allows scientists to sub...

Chemoreception: Identifying Friends and Foes

The vomeronasal organ detects chemical cues that trigger sexual, aggressive and defensive behaviors. An in situ hybridization analysis has identified the specificities of nearly a hundred VNO receptors and elucidated the logic by which they encode these cues.

Beta-agonists--friends or foes?

Competition and quality: friends or foes?

The extensive promotion and proliferation of articles and learned essays on Total Quality Management (TQM) have filled the pages of magazines, conference proceedings and academic journals such as this over the past few years. A limited number of commentators have stuck their necks out to question some of the supposed gains that such a managerial revolution can have in terms of the intended bene...