During limb movement and locomotion, animals store elastic energy in the tendons of the feet, legs, and other limbs. In the turkey, much of the force generated by the gastrocnemius muscle during locomotion is stored as elastic energy through deformation of the tendon. During growth and development, the leg tendons in some avians, including turkeys, mineralize and result in an increase in tensil...

A recent publication analyzed MicroRNAs (miRNAs) globallyinhumans [1]. Here, we summarize several key concepts from this article. Apparently during evolution, there were several origins of miRNAs and the authors embarked on a detailed and specific analysis of these events. In fact, the authors analyzed 1,433 extant human miRNAs that originated 15 times during evolution. These steps correspond t...

Anesthesia and analgesia are important in human and veterinary medicine, especially in surgical procedures. Rodents, avians, and exotic species are required to be anesthetized using an appropriate anesthetic regimen. This study aimed to suggest a new anesthetic drug and method in order to facilitate anesthesia as well as analgesia among rabbits, laboratory animals, and humans. Spinal inje...

A major unknown in avian biology is the morphological basis of flight style diversity. While certain aspects pectoral anatomy, such as an enlarged sternum and hypertrophied muscles, clearly relate to aerial locomotion general, finer details form-function correspondence are less apparent. Nevertheless, furcula shape has been used infer extinct avians because cranial origin largest muscle, m. pec...

The prion protein is a copper binding glycoprotein that in mammals can misfold into a pathogenic isoform leading to prion diseases, as opposed, surprisingly, to avians. The avian prion N-terminal tandem repeat is richer in prolines than the mammal one, and understanding their effect on conformation is of great biological importance. Here we succeeded in investigating the conformations of a sing...

The early Mesozoic is marked by several global-scale environmental events, including the emplacement of large igneous provinces, such as Siberian Traps, Wrangellia, and Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP). These have been hypothesised drivers successful diversification Pan-Aves, lineage archosaurs closer to birds than crocodiles. We characterize here body size evolution terrestrial pan-av...

Usher syndrome type 1 (USH1) associates severe congenital deafness, vestibular dysfunction and progressive retinitis pigmentosa leading to blindness. The gene encoding myosin VIIA is responsible for USH1B. Mutations in the murine orthologous gene lead to the shaker-1 phenotype, which manifests cochlear and vestibular dysfunction, without any retinal defect. To address this phenotypic discrepanc...

The recessive mouse mutation kreisler affects hindbrain segmentation and inner ear development in homozygous mice. The mouse gene affected by the mutation was found to encode a basic domain leucine-zipper (bZIP)-type transcription factor of the Maf-family named kr (Cordes, S.P. and Barsh, G.S. (1994) Cell 79, 1025-1034). The avian bZIP transcription factor mafB, which shows high homology to kr,...

Copyright: © 2013. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS OpenJournals. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Avian mycobacteriosis (AM) is a zoonotic disease caused by Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC), which can spread from avians to other farmed animals such as cattle and pigs as well as to humans. This study is the first report of granulomatous inflammation, as a resul...

Lysine is frequently a first- or second-limiting amino acid in poultry diets. Improving the efficiency of lysine use for protein synthesis would effectively lower the lysine requirement and decrease feed costs. Understanding how lysine is degraded and how the degradation is regulated would identify potential molecular targets for interventions to decrease lysine degradation. To better understan...