As reported by earlier investigators, the epithelium of the digestive tubules is composed of two cell-types. One type of cell is glandular, the other type is absorptive and digestive, and to a lesser extent secretory. The latter type of cell also contains glycogen and numerous lipid globules, so that the digestive gland as a whole contains a large quantity of reserve food material. The epitheli...

potato tuberworm, phthorimaea operculella zeller (lepidoptera; gelechiidae) is a worldwide pest of solanaceous crops. larvae feed inside galleries in foliage, stems and tubers making chemical control unsuccessful, so other control methods should be applied. in recent years many plants have received genes that encode toxic proteins as a strategy to resist insect pests. in this study, optimal ph ...

The effect of a neuropeptide, the tachykinin on α-amylase, protease and lipase activities in the midgut of American cockroach, Periplaneta americana (Linnaeus) is evaluated . Immunohistochemical reactivities against tachykinin (tachykininir) were detected in the midgut. Tachykinin-ir cells in three regions (anterior, median and posterior) of the midgut were counted in normally fed, starved for ...

The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of the diet containing Laurencia caspica (red algae) on blood parameters and digestive enzymes activity of goldfish after 90-day period. Goldfish (weight 6.10±0.1 gr) were divided to four experimental groups (30 individuals in each replication) including experimental treatment of the control group (without using red algae) and three trea...

Abstract Background Infestation by tea green leafhoppers ( Empoasca (Matsumurasca) onukii ) can cause a series of biochemical changes in leaves. As typical cell-rupture feeder, E. secretes proteases while using its stylet to probe the tender shoots plants Camellia sinensis ). This study identified and analyzed expressed specifically salivary gland (SG) gut through enzymatic activity assays comp...

The authors previously demonstrated that unconjugated bilirubin (UCB) may inhibit the activities of various digestive proteases, including trypsin and chymotrypsin. The digestive proteases in the lower gut are important in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel diseases. The effects of UCB on the inflammation and levels of digestive proteases in feces of rats with colitis have not yet been reve...

Plant cystatins, similar to other defense proteins, include hypervariable, positively selected amino acid sites presumably impacting their biological activity. Using 29 single mutants of the eighth domain of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) multicystatin, SlCYS8, we assessed here the potential of site-directed mutagenesis at positively selected amino acid sites to generate cystatin variants with i...

A purely information theory-guided approach to quantitatively characterize protease specificity is established. We calculate an entropy value for each protease subpocket based on sequences of cleaved substrates extracted from the MEROPS database. We compare our results with known subpocket specificity profiles for individual proteases and protease groups (e.g. serine proteases, metallo protease...