Protein prenylation is the addition of a 15 or 20 carbon lipid to cysteine near carboxyl terminus target proteins. Prentlyation increases hydrophobicity, which facilitates membrane associations and protein-protein interaction. generally conserved among eukaryotes, mutations in genes that carry out are lethal animals yeast. In plants not always lethal, but they do affect development, disease res...

Our understanding of the role of Ca2+ in blue/UV-A photoreceptor signaling in a single cell is limited. Insight into calcium signaling has now been attained in Physcomitrella patens and its cryptochrome and phototropin knock-outs. Physcomitrella patens caulonemal filaments grow in the dark by apical extension and their apical cells are highly polarized. Fura-2-dextran ratio images of the apical...

Endogenous 24 nt short interfering RNAs (siRNAs), derived mostly from intergenic and repetitive genomic regions, constitute a major class of endogenous small RNAs in flowering plants. Accumulation of Arabidopsis thaliana 24 nt siRNAs requires the Dicer family member DCL3, and clear homologs of DCL3 exist in both flowering and non-flowering plants. However, the absence of a conspicuous 24 nt pea...

Mosses (Musci, Bryophytaea) are one of the oldest groups of land plants present among the earth’s flora. They originated 500 million years ago (for a recent discussion of the time scale involved, see Heckman et al., 2001) and are currently represented by approximately 10,000 species that colonize diverse habitats that range from high mountains to deep forests and from Antarctica to deserts. Evo...

A single specimen of the nematode Molineus patens (Dujardin, 1845) was isolated from the intestine of the ermine (Mustela erminea L.) found dead on a road in Lubuskie voivodeship (Western Poland) in July 2008. Since this is the first record of the parasite in the ermine from Poland, description, biometrical data and figures are given.

A complex mixture of fatty acid-derived aldehydes, ketones, and alcohols is released upon wounding of the moss Physcomitrella patens. To investigate the formation of these oxylipins at the molecular level we isolated a lipoxygenase from P. patens, which was identified in an EST library by sequence homology to lipoxygenases from plants. Sequence analysis of the cDNA showed that it exhibits a dom...