Respiratory and Gastrointestinal systems; friends or foes?

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...

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...

Alcohol and Apoptosis: Friends or Foes?

Alcohol abuse causes 79,000 deaths stemming from severe organ damage in the United States every year. Clinical manifestations of long-term alcohol abuse on the cardiac muscle include defective contractility with the development of dilated cardiomyopathy and low-output heart failure; which has poor prognosis with less than 25% survival for more than three years. In contrast, low alcohol consumpt...