Deadly toxins and resistance to them are an evolutionary enigma. Selection for increased resistance does not occur if predators do not survive encounters with toxic prey. Similarly, deadly toxins are of no advantage to individual prey if it dies delivering the toxins. For individual selection to drive the coevolutionary arms race between resistant predators and lethal prey, the survivorship of ...

TNF has remarkable antitumor activities; however, therapeutic applications have not been possible because of the systemic and lethal proinflammatory effects induced by TNF. Both the antitumor and inflammatory effects of TNF are mediated by the TNF receptor p55 (p55TNFR) (encoded by the Tnfrsf1a gene). The antitumor effect stems from an induction of cell death in tumor endothelium, but the cell ...

Background: Herbicides are widely used in agriculture to kill a large variety of unwanted weeds. However, the application in water ecosystems may pose harmful impacts on the health of aquatic organisms. We studied the acute toxicity of four major types of herbicides on the survival of adult shrimp, Artemia franciscana (AF). Methods: The brine shrimp, AF, was hatched from the commercially encys...

Background: Trachyspermum ammi is one of the prominent plant in traditional medicine of the east with several medicinal effects such as improvement of stomach disease, digestive disorder, diarrhea, hemorrhoid, bladder stones, respiratory disease and etc. Medicinal plants is one of the important reason of toxicity particularly in children and the elderly therefore, evaluation of the toxic effect...

There are few studies that have evaluated hydrocarbon toxicity to vertically migrating deep-sea micronekton. Crustaceans were collected alive using a 9-m2 Tucker trawl with a thermally insulated cod end and returned to the laboratory in 10 °C seawater. Toxicity of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon 1-methylnaphthalene to Americamysis bahia, Janicella spinacauda, Systellaspis debilis, Sergestes...

The effects of humic acid and water hardness on acute cadmium toxicity and accumulation were determined, using Puntius gonionotus Bleeker. The toxicities were expressed as the median lethal concentration (LC50) and the 96-h LC50 value of cadmium was 2.30 mg/L. Three different types of water hardness were used: soft, moderately-hard and hard, with total hardness concentrations of 55, 113, and 22...

Administration of cyclophosphamide at a dose which is lethal to 10% of control athymic nude mice resulted in sudden death within 3 h in all mice that had been pretreated with the glutathione synthesis inhibitor L-buthionine-SR-sulfoximine. In Fischer 344 rats pretreated with L-buthionine-SR-sulfoximine, the cyclophosphamide dose producing 100% acute toxicity was lowered from 500-150 mg/kg; card...

Eurystatins A and B, were isolated from the cultured broth of Streptomyces eurythermus R353-21. They showed specific and potent inhibitory activity against prolyl endopeptidase and did not show antimicrobial activity. No lethal toxicity was observed for the two compounds after ip administration in mice at 200 mg/kg.

At present, fluoropyrimidine, based on 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), remains one of the most frequently prescribed chemotherapeutics drugs for the treatment of cancer. Dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) is the rate-limiting enzyme in the catabolism of 5-FU, and DPD enzymatic activities are usually varied dramatically from individual to individual, including both the intrapatient differences and the...

Moraxella osloensis is a bacterium that is mutualistically associated with Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita, a nematode that has potential for the biocontrol of mollusk pests, especially the slug Deroceras reticulatum. We discovered that purified M. osloensis lipopolysaccharide (LPS) possesses a lethal toxicity to D. reticulatum when administered by injection but no contact or oral toxicity to thi...