Adhesion is an important virulence factor of Vibrio alginolyticus. This factor may be affected by environmental conditions; however, its molecular mechanism remains unclear. In our previous research, adhesion deficient strains were obtained by culturing V. alginolyticus under stresses including Cu, Pb, Hg, and low pH. With RNA-seq and bioinformatics analysis, we found that all of these stress t...

Co-dependent geological and climatic changes obscure how species interact in deep time. The interplay between these environmental factors makes it hard to discern whether ecological competition exerts an upper limit on species richness. Here, using the exceptional fossil record of Cenozoic Era macroperforate planktonic foraminifera, we assess the evidence for alternative modes of macroevolution...

Many developmental processes generate invariant phenotypes in a wide range of ecological conditions. Such robustness to environmental variation is a fundamental biological property, yet its extent, limits, and adaptive significance have rarely been assessed empirically. Here we tested how environmental variation affects vulval formation in Caenorhabditis nematodes. In different environments, a ...

A meaningful environmental impact analysis should go beyond the accounting of pressures from resource use and actually assess how resource demand affects ecosystems. The various currently available footprints of nations report the environmental pressures e.g. water use or pollutant emissions, driven by consumption. However, there have been limited attempts to assess the environmental consequenc...

This overview of suicidal behavior of children and adolescents covers aspects of epidemiology and risk factors. The risk factors can be classified as early developmental experiences, expression of affects, and current environmental situations. These risk factors include depression, aggression, parental suicidal behavior, family losses, and family violence and depression.

The outcome of defence by the invertebrate immunity has recently been shown to be more complex than previously thought. In particular, the outcome is affected by biotic and abiotic environmental variation, host genotype, parasite genotype and their interaction. Knowledge of conditions under which environmental variation affects the outcome of an infection is one important question that relates ...

Depression is a common and debilitating psychiatric syndrome with a complex risk architecture marked by interacting genetic and environmental factors. In this issue of Neuron, the study by Kohli et al. (2011) reports a novel genome-wide supported risk variant for depression that affects hippocampal gene expression, anatomy, and biochemistry.

Escherichia coli 469-3 synthesizes fibrillar fimbriae at 37 degrees C, but not at 18 degrees C, which promote its adherence to human colonocytes. RNA homologous with a cloned fragment of the strain 469-3 chromosome necessary for normal expression of fimbriae was virtually undetectable in bacteria grown at 18 degrees C, indicating that environmental temperature affects expression by regulating t...

Congenital hearing loss with many genetic and environmental causes affects 1 in 1000 newborns. Mutations in the GJB2(Gap Junction Beta-2) gene encoding the gap junction protein connexin 26 have been established as the main cause of autosomal recessive non-syndromic hearing loss. The aim of this study was to study the frequency of one mutation (35delG) of GJB2 gene in Kerman non-syndromic deaf p...

The applied discipline of environmental health sciences seeks to clearly establish, secure and promote its role within many diverse science-based disciplines with similar names and yet very different approaches. These diverse disciplines include environmental science, ecology, environmental ethics, and many others. Traditionally, environmental health has been distinguished from these other disc...