Corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), the principal regulator of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, has been identified in various organ systems, including the immune and the female and male reproductive systems. CRH-like immunoreactivity has been reported in peripheral inflammatory sites and in a number of reproductive organs, including the ovaries, endometrial glands, decidualized endo...

Prevalence of abortion is higher in women with autoimmune thyroid disease. In the majority of cases, however, no abnormality of thyroid function is detected despite the high levels of antithyroid antibodies. The direct influence of such harmful autoantibodies in female reproductive organs may serve a role in pregnancy loss. In this study, expression of thyroglobulin in the reproductive tissues ...

Two gonadotrophin releasing hormone (GnRH) constructs prepared by either chemical conjugation to keyhole limpet hemocyanin (GnRH-KLH) or as an expressed recombinant fusion protein (Multimer) were evaluated with or without adjuvants (immunostimulating complexes, ISCOMs, or cytosine-phosphate-guanosine oligodeoxynucleotides, CpG ODNs). After subcutaneous administration to Balb/c male mice at Week...

Nesfatin-1 is a recently discovered anorexigenic peptide which is distributed in several brain areas implicated in the feeding and metabolic regulation. Recently, it has been reported that nesfatin-1 is expressed not only in brain, but also in peripheral organs such as digestive organs, adipose tissues, heart, and reproductive organs. Nesfatin-1 is markedly expressed in the pancreas, stomach an...

Among closely related taxa, proteins involved in reproduction generally evolve more rapidly than other proteins. Here, we apply a functional and comparative genomics approach to compare functional divergence across a deep phylogenetic array of egg-laying and live-bearing vertebrate taxa. We aligned and annotated a set of 4,986 1 : 1 : 1 : 1 : 1 orthologs in Anolis carolinensis (green lizard), D...

Reproductive traits in plants tend to evolve rapidly due to various causes that include plant-pollinator coevolution and pollen competition, but the genomic basis of reproductive trait evolution is still largely unknown. To characterize evolutionary patterns of genome wide gene expression in reproductive tissues in the gametophyte and to compare them to developmental stages of the sporophyte, w...

BACKGROUND Caenorhabditis elegans has traditionally been used as a model for studying nematode biology, but its small size limits the ability for researchers to perform some experiments such as high-throughput tissue-specific gene expression studies. However, the dissection of individual tissues is possible in the parasitic nematode Ascaris suum due to its relatively large size. Here, we take a...

BACKGROUND Tetracarpidium conophorum (Mull. Arg.) Hutch. & Dalz is one of the many medicinal plants used for ages in folklore as male fertility enhancers. The current study evaluates the effect of the plant leaf extract on alcohol - induced reproductive toxicity in male rats. METHODS Thirty rats were randomly divided into six groups of five animals each; Group 1 (positive control) received no...