It was once believed that the placenta blocks direct cell transfer between the mother and the foetus, that is, until the discovery of the maternal and foetal microchimerism which proved the existence of cell trafficking during pregnancy [1, 2]. It has been reported that 100% of the pregnant women at 36th week carry foetal cells in their circulation, the prevalence of which decreases, by 22–75%,...

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks accounted for more losses than Internet financial fraud and viruses combined (CSI/FBI 2003). The Internet has been exposed as being particularly vulnerable to Denial of Service Attacks. This has stimulated research into DDoS and the consequent development of many techniques which aim to control them. This paper aim...

Autophagy is a membrane trafficking pathway that results in the formation of autophagosomes which deliver portions of the cytosol to lysosomes for degradation. When autophagosomes engulf intracellular pathogens, the pathway is called 'xenophagy' because it leads to the removal of foreign material. Autophagy is activated during infection by Toll-like receptors that recognize pathogen-associated ...

RNA silencing is a conserved mechanism in eukaryotes that plays an important role in various biological processes including regulation of gene expression. RNA silencing also plays a role in genome stability and protects plants against invading nucleic acids such as transgenes and viruses. Recently, RNA silencing has been found to play a role in defence against bacterial plant pathogens in Arabi...

• Priming of defence is a strategy employed by plants exposed to stress to enhance resistance against future stress episodes with minimal associated costs on growth. Here, we test the hypothesis that application of priming agents to seeds can result in plants with primed defences. • We measured resistance to arthropod herbivores and disease in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) plants grown from see...

Basal resistance involves a multitude of pathogen- and herbivore-inducible defence mechanisms, ranging from localized callose deposition to systemic defence gene induction by salicylic acid (SA) and jasmonic acid (JA). In this study, we have explored and dissected genetic variation in the responsiveness of basal defence mechanisms within a selection of Arabidopsis accessions. Responsiveness of ...