Oxidants and antioxidants: friends or foes?

Oxidants and antioxidants: friends or foes?

Albeit the existence of ‘free radicals’ having been known for a considerable time within the sphere of chemistry, these interesting kinds of oxidizing molecules attracted the attention of medical scientists and physicians during the early 1950s when Denham Harman started to publish a number of reports on the “free radical theory of aging” [1]. Two decades later, grounded in the recognition that...

Antibiotics and Antioxidants: Friends or Foes During Therapy?

Different types of biochemical and physiological factors (including commonly used cellular and dietary antioxidants) affect the activity of therapeutic antibiotics. The findings from our lab have shown that the presence of glutathione, N-acetylcysteine or ascorbic acid in the growth medium decreases the bacterial susceptibility towards fluoroquinolone and aminoglycoside antibiotics. However the...

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...

Beta-agonists--friends or foes?

Bacterial toxins: friends or foes?

Many emerging and reemerging bacterial pathogens synthesize toxins that serve as primary virulence factors. We highlight seven bacterial toxins produced by well-established or newly emergent pathogenic microbes. These toxins, which affect eukaryotic cells by a variety of means, include Staphylococcus aureus alpha-toxin, Shiga toxin, cytotoxic necrotizing factor type 1, Escherichia coli heat-sta...