Why Do Animals Have So Many Receptors? The Role of Multiple Chemosensors in Animal Perception

Why do animals have so many receptors? The role of multiple chemosensors in animal perception.

Many animals have an abundance and diverse assortment of peripheral sensors, both across and within sensory modalities. Multiple sensors offer many functional advantages to an animal's ability to perceive and respond to environmental signals. Advantages include extending the ability to detect and determine the spatial distribution of stimuli, improving the range and accuracy of discrimination a...

So Many Plasminogen Receptors: Why?

Plasminogen and plasmin tether to cell surfaces through ubiquitously expressed and structurally quite dissimilar family of proteins, as well as some nonproteins, that are collectively referred to as plasminogen receptors. Of the more than one dozen plasminogen receptors that have been identified, many have been shown to facilitate plasminogen activation to plasmin and to protect bound plasmin f...

Why Do You Ask So Many Questions ?

[N]o amount of telling somebody in mere words that one is or is not angry is the same as what one might tell them by gesture or tone of voice .... Anyhow, it is all nonsense. I mean, the notion that language is made of words is all nonsense -and when I said that gestures could not be translated into "mere words/' I was talking nonsense, because there is no such thlng as "mere words" ... Gregory...

Animal Minds Do Animals have Emotional Lives?

The interferon response to intracellular DNA: why so many receptors?

The detection of intracellular DNA has emerged to be a key event in the innate immune response to viruses and intracellular bacteria, and during conditions of sterile inflammation and autoimmunity. One of the consequences of the detection of DNA as a 'stranger' and a 'danger' signal is the production of type I interferons and pro-inflammatory cytokines. Much work has been dedicated to the eluci...