Since early mammals other than monotremes bypassed the use of shelled eggs in their ancestry, what are the benefits of retaining the shell for platypuses and echidnas? Recent genetic studies are shining a light on where monotremes like the platypus fit in relation to other mammals. What chara...
Damage to the colon mucus barrier, the first line of defense against microorganisms, is an important determinant of intestinal diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer, and disorder in extraintestinal organs. The mucus layer has attracted the attention of the scientific communit...
There are two major subclasses of astrocytes, one specific to the telencephalon and the other to non-telencephalon regions, in addition to several other highly specialized astrocyte-like cell types such as Müller glia of the retina and Bergmann glia of the cerebellum (Zeisel et al., 2018). ...
Therapsids were "mammal-like" reptiles andare ancestors to the mammals, including humans, found today. One group of therapsids is called dicynodonts. ... It lived during the Late Triassic, about 210-205 million years ago, about 10 million years later than previous findings of dicynodonts. ...
Several studies suggested that ants are able to identify what exactly restrains the movements of another individual and to direct their rescue behaviour precisely to that object. To shed more light on the question of how precise the identification of the source of restraint of another ant is, ...
First, miRNAs interact through a complementary antisense sequence with the mRNA targets [17] (Figure 1(1)). Second, the miRNA action area is delimited in the 3 untranslated region (UTR) of the mRNA [17,18] (Figure 1(2)). Third, there are some conserved elements in the miRNA:mRNA ...
Among these subclasses, microRNAs (miRNAs or miRs) are the most extensively well-known and well-studied ncRNAs. Because these molecules appear to play an important role in cellular biology, more investigations are necessary to elucidate their true functions. If we look at the history of this ...
toxics Review Persistent Threats by Persistent Pollutants: Chemical Nature, Concerns and Future Policy Regarding PCBs—What Are We Heading For? Bart Hens 1,2 ID and Luc Hens 3,* 1 College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan, 428 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1065, USA; barthens@umich...