Punicalagin, an essential component of pomegranate rind, has been demonstrated to possess antimicrobial activity against several food-borne pathogens, but its activity on the virulence of pathogens and its anti-quorum-sensing (anti-QS) potential have been rarely reported. This study investigated the efficacy of subinhibitory concentrations of punicalagin on Salmonella virulence factors and QS s...

Prophage typically are induced to a lytic cycle under stressful environmental conditions or when the host's survival is threatened. However, stress-independent, spontaneous induction also occurs in nature and may be cell density dependent, but the in vivo signal(s) that can trigger induction is unknown. In the present study, we report that acyl-homoserine lactones (AHL), the essential signaling...

The ability to direct differentiation of mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells into specific lineages not only provides new insights into the pathways that regulate lineage selection but also has translational applications, for example in drug discovery. We set out to develop a method of differentiating ES cells into mesodermal cells at high efficiency without first having to induce embryoid body for...

Cell signaling in Escherichia coli biofilms is more important than originally known, in that autoinducer two (AI-2), AI-1 (N-acylhomoserine lactones), indole, hydroxylated indoles, norepinephrine, and epinephrine are all functional signals in this organism. This gives the bacterium the ability to monitor not only the presence of cells of its own species (through AI-2 and indole) but also the ac...

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be established from somatic cells. However, there is currently no established strategy to generate corneal epithelial cells from iPS cells. In this study, we investigated whether corneal epithelial cells could be differentiated from iPS cells. We tested 2 distinct sources: human adult dermal fibroblast (HDF)-derived iPS cells (253G1) and human adult corn...

lentinan a polysaccharide from medicinal mushroom i.e lentinus, has been known to have anticancer properties. telomerase activity is not observed in normal healthy cells, whereas in cancerous cells telomerase expression is high. telomerase represents a promising cancer therapeutic target. we investigated the inhibitory effect of lentinan on telomerase reverse transcriptase gene (htert) which is...

lentiviral vectors are promising gene delivery tools capable of transducing a variety of dividing and non-dividing cells, including pluripotent stem cells which are refractory for transduction by murine retroviruses. although there is a growing debate on the safety of lentiviral vectors for gene transfer, in particular for those derived from human immunodeficiency viruses, type one (hiv-1) and ...

abstract background: schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder and numerous genes and loci are beleived to be involved in this disease. recent studies have reported a strong genetic association between dtnbp1 (dystrobrevin-binding protein 1) gene variants and schizophrenia. methods: in this research, we used a case-control study to establish the possible association between the p1635 (rs3213207...