Postcranial pneumaticity has been reported in numerous extinct sauropsid groups including pterosaurs, birds, saurischian dinosaurs, and, most recently, both crurotarsan and basal archosauriform taxa. By comparison with extant birds, pneumatic features in fossils have formed the basis for anatomical inferences concerning pulmonary structure and function, in addition to higher-level inferences re...

A sub-population of the neural crest is known to play a crucial role in development of the cardiac outflow tract. Studies in avians have mapped the complete migratory pathways taken by 'cardiac' neural crest cells en route from the neural tube to the developing heart. A cardiac neural crest lineage is also known to exist in mammals, although detailed information on its axial level of origin and...

It is rapidly becoming accepted that the vertebrate neural tube, in particular the hindbrain, develops into a segmented structure. After segment formation, cells in the neural tube do not cross segmental boundaries, and segment-specific gene expression is observed. However, it is not known what positional cues instruct the neural tube to express genes in this restricted manner. We have cloned a...

13-tubulin of budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a polypeptide of 457 amino acids encoded by the unique gene TUB2. We investigated the function of the carboxy-terminal part of yeast [I-tubulin corresponding to the carboxy-terminal variable domain of mammalian and avian fi-tubulins. The GAA codon for Glu-431 of TUB2 was altered to TAA termination codon by using in vitro site-directed muta...

Aim The increasing prevalence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) Escherichia coli is one of the intractable, economic veterinary and public health obstacle of the 21st century. As a component of the gut microbiota (GM), it is aimed in this study to establish a rat model to examine the role of E. coli in contributing to the increasing antimicrobial resistance of GM. Methods and Results Ten rats were ...

A frustrating reality of neuroscience is the tendency of neurons to respond in different ways to repeated presentations of identical stimuli. This variability might arise from several different sources, but to some extent, particularly at the level of sensory transduction, it is noise in the purest sense. In principle, the effects of noise can be mitigated by either averaging across time or acr...

F if any, proteins have been studied in as many organisms as have the hemoglobins. They are found in bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals, serving physiological roles ranging from oxygen transport in the blood of vertebrates to catalyzing the combination of oxygen and nitric oxide to form nitrate in bacteria, yeast, and worms (1, 2). Hence hemoglobins and the globin genes encoding them have bee...

Endothelin-1 (ET-1) is a 21-amino acid peptide produced by the endothelium and other cell types with a variety of physiological functions. Its original description dates back to 1980s, and it is distinguished by a very potent vasoconstrictor activity (Yanagisawa et al. 1988, Braunwald et al. 2001). Two other isoforms of endothelin have been discovered (ET-2 and ET-3), but endothelium produces o...

Immunoglobulin M, the predominant isotype in fish, is generally of relatively low specificity. This major drawback for sero-diagnosis may be overcome by competitive Elisa techniques. Competing mammalian or avian antibodies of high affinity improve the resolution between specific and cross-reacting fish IgM. for Aquatic Animal Diseases are all direct (agent identification). Nonetheless some sero...