Due to an interaction between gall wasp Andricus sternlichti Bellido and Quercus infectoria G.Olivier from Fagaceae, the oak galls with a wide range of industrial and pharmaceutical applications are produced. Quercus infectoria galls have been well-known by both ethnopharmacology and traditional medicine of Iran. The aim of current study was a comprehensive collection...

Gall wasps (Cynipidae) represent the most spectacular radiation of gall-inducing insects. In addition to true gall formers, gall wasps also include phytophagous inquilines, which live inside the galls induced by gall wasps or other insects. Here we present the first comprehensive molecular and total-evidence analyses of higher-level gall wasp relationships. We studied more than 100 taxa represe...

House dust mites are of immense importance to human beings because of their positive role in causing various kinds of allergenic manifestations such as: allergic rhinitis, asthma, dermatitis and conjunctivitis as reported from different regions of the globe including India. The study was carried out in August 2012 to September 2013. During this period 200 dust samples collected from the human d...

BACKGROUND Carcinoma gall bladder accounts for 98% of all the gall bladder malignancies and is the sixth most common malignancy of the gastrointestinal tract worldwide. Incidental gall bladder carcinoma (IGBC) is an incidental finding of carcinoma diagnosed during a laparoscopic cholecystectomy or on histopathological examination of gall bladder specimen removed for benign gall bladder diseases...

Octreotide therapy in acromegaly is associated with an increased prevalence of gall stones, which may be the result of an inhibition of gall bladder motility. Gall stone prevalence in untreated acromegalic patients relative to the general population is unknown, however, and the presence of gall stones and gall bladder motility in these patients and in acromegalic patients receiving octreotide w...

The concentration of hexosamine, a marker for mucin, was determined and related to the degree of cholesterol saturation and to the occurrence of cholesterol crystals in gall bladder bile of gall stone patients (n = 40) and gall stone free subjects (n = 25). Ten of the gall stone patients had been treated with chenodeoxycholic acid (CDCA) and eight with ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) three to four ...

One of the most striking characteristics of gall-forming insects is the variability in gall position, morphology, and complexity. Our knowledge of the driving forces behind the evolutionary divergence of gall types is limited. Natural enemies, competition, and behavioral constraints might be involved. We present a cladogram, based on sequences of COI and COII (1952bp), of mitochondrial DNA for ...

Miniature inverted-repeat transposable elements (MITEs) are predicted to play important roles on genome evolution. We developed a BLASTN-based approach for de novo identification of MITEs and systematically analyzed MITEs in rice genome. The genome of rice cultivar Nipponbare (Oryza sativa ssp. japonica) harbors 178,533 MITE-related sequences classified into 338 families. Pairwise nucleotide di...

BACKGROUND Nitric oxide is a major neurotransmitter in non-adrenergic, non-cholinergic (NANC) pathways. NANC inhibitory innervation has been shown in human gall bladder muscle in vitro; the role of nitric oxide in human gall bladder emptying however is undefined. AIMS To study the effect of glyceryl trinitrate, a nitric oxide donor, on gall bladder emptying in healthy subjects using a randomi...

We tested the enemy hypothesis for gall morphology on a model system comprising two Diplolepis rose gall wasp species and their associated parasitoids. The enemy hypothesis predicts both that gall traits will influence parasitoid attack rates within species, and that galls with contrasting morphologies will support different parasitoid communities. This hypothesis is supported by studies at bot...