Bacteria that colonize plant roots and promote plant growth are referred to as plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR). PGPR are highly diverse and in this review we focus on rhizobacteria as biocontrol agents. Their effects can occur via local antagonism to soil-borne pathogens or by induction of systemic resistance against pathogens throughout the entire plant. Several substances produced...

It is generally known that there are many endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) in the effluents from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Most research has focused on the occurrence of estrogenic or androgenic activities, while ignoring that there are environmental chemicals disrupting thyroid system, which is essential for growth and development in both humans and animals. In the present work...

K1 strain of Plasmdoium falciparum is resistant in vitro to chloroquine, pyrimethamine and sulfadoxine. Response of this strain to combinations of antimalarial drugs in the in vitro hypoxanthine incorporation test was coupled with that of a line of strain NF54 relatively sensitive to chloroquine and fully sensitive to other antimalarials. Pyrimethamine and sulfadoxine showed potentiative synerg...

Maternal inheritance of mitochondria creates a sex-specific selective sieve with implications for male longevity, disease susceptibility and infertility. Because males are an evolutionary dead end for mitochondria, mitochondrial mutations that are harmful or beneficial to males but not females cannot respond directly to selection. Although the importance of this male/female asymmetry in evoluti...

Effects of chemical fertilizers (urea, super phosphate and potash) on toxicities of two carbamate insecticides, carbaryl and carbofuran, individually to the N2-fixing cyanobacterium, Cylindrospermum sp. were studied in vitro at partially lethal levels (below highest permissive concentrations) of each insecticide. The average number of vegetative cells between two polar heterocysts was 16.3 in c...

Antagonistic analogues of luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) belong to a class of compounds that can be utilized for treatment of some hormone-dependent cancers and gynecologic disorders. Recently, we synthesized and tested a large number of LHRH analogues for LHRH antagonistic activity in the dispersed pituitary cell superfusion system. This fast, reliable, and dynamic system made it...

Based on the assumption that the prolactin receptor (PRLR) is activated by PRL-induced sequential dimerization, potential human PRL (hPRL) antagonists were designed that sterically interfere with binding site 2. We previously reported the unexpected agonistic properties of these hPRL analogs in the rat Nb2 bioassay (Goffin, V., Struman, I., Mainfroid, V., Kinet, S., and Martial, J. A. (1994) J....