Introduction: Effects of melatonin (MT) were comparatively examined on melanophores of isolated skin in adults and tadpole’s tailfin of a frog Rana cyanophlyctis. MT is generally considered as a potent melanophores aggregating hormone besides regulating the sleep wake cycle in vertebrates. Methods: Melanophore size index (MSI) was chosen as a recording parameter of the responses. Concentr...

In order to overcome the drawbacks of standard shuffled frog leaping algorithm that converges slowly at the last stage and easily falls into local minima, this paper proposed two-phases learning shuffled frog leaping algorithm. The modified algorithm added the elite Gaussian learning strategy in the global information exchange phase, updated frog leaping rule and added the learning capability t...

The Indonesian island of Sumatra contains several endemic species of parachuting frog of the genus Rhacophorus. Most of these are known from small type series collected from only a few localities, and consequently, many Sumatran Rhacophorus species are poorly understood. Using mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), we investigated relationships among a group of Rhacophorus species from southern Sumatra. Ou...

Bitter taste perception in vertebrates relies on a variable number of bitter taste receptor (Tas2r) genes, ranging from only three functional genes in chicken to as many as approximately 50 in frogs. Humans possess a medium-sized Tas2r repertoire encoding three broadly and several narrowly tuned receptors plus receptors with intermediate tuning properties. Such tuning information is not availab...

With so many diverse functions such as transporter of vitamin D metabolites and fatty acids, actin scavenger and macrophage activating factor, Gc must have been one of the most conserved proteins in animal kingdom. Our objective was to investigate the evolution of Gc by analyzing its differences at protein level. Using BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) searches, Gc amino acid sequences ...