by Satinder Pal Singh, Balbir Bagicha Singh, Deepali G. Kalambhe, Devendra Pathak, Rabinder Singh Aulakh, Navneet K. Dhand

Background

Taenia solium (T. solium) cysticercosis remains a neglected zoonotic disease in India. The current study was planned to estimate the prevalence of T. solium porcine cysticercosis in the Punjab state of India, to compare this prevalence with the disease prevalence in pigs reared outside Punjab and to assess the distribution of the parasite (altro…)

by Pedro H. Gazzinelli-Guimaraes, Neerav Dhanani, Charles H. King, Carl H. Campbell, Herminio O. Aurelio, Josefo Ferro, Rassul Nala, Alan Fenwick, Anna E. Phillips

Background

A pioneering strategy developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the control of schistosomiasis was the concept of a height-based dose pole to determine praziquantel (PZQ) dosing in large-scale treatment campaigns. However, some recent studies have shown variable accuracy for the dose pole in terms of (altro…)

by Sifat Sharmin, Kathryn Glass, Elvina Viennet, David Harley

Geographical mapping of dengue in resource-limited settings is crucial for targeting control interventions but is challenging due to the problem of zero-inflation because many cases are not reported. We developed a negative binomial generalised linear mixed effect model accounting for zero-inflation, spatial, and temporal random effects to investigate the spatial variation in monthly dengue cases in Bangladesh. The model was fitted to the (altro…)

by Keerti Kaumudee Dixit, Sandeep Verma, Om Prakash Singh, Dharmendra Singh, Akhil Pratap Singh, Ratan Gupta, Narendra Singh Negi, Pradeep Das, Shyam Sundar, Ruchi Singh, Poonam Salotra

Background

The World Health Organization has targeted elimination of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) in the Indian subcontinent (ISC) by 2020. Despite distinctive decline seen in the number of VL cases in ISC, there is still a quest for development of a diagnostic test which has the (altro…)

by Hannah K. Frank, Scott D. Boyd, Elizabeth A. Hadly

As humans move and alter habitats, they change the disease risk for themselves, their commensal animals and wildlife. Bartonella bacteria are prevalent in mammals and cause numerous human infections. Understanding how this genus has evolved and switched hosts in the past can reveal how current patterns were established and identify potential mechanisms for future cross-species transmission. We analyzed patterns of Bartonella transmission (altro…)

by Piero L. Olliaro, Annette C. Kuesel, Christine M. Halleux, Mark Sullivan, John C. Reeder

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by Yi Xu, Washington Luis Da Silva, Yajuan Qian, Stewart M. Gray

The C-terminal region of the minor structural protein of potato leafroll virus (PLRV), known as the readthrough protein (RTP), is involved in efficient virus movement, tissue tropism and symptom development. Analysis of numerous C-terminal deletions identified a five-amino acid motif that is required for RTP function. A PLRV mutant expressing RTP with these five amino acids deleted (Δ5aa-RTP) was compromised (altro…)

by Sushama Telwatte, Sulggi Lee, Ma Somsouk, Hiroyu Hatano, Christopher Baker, Philipp Kaiser, Peggy Kim, Tsui-Hua Chen, Jeffrey Milush, Peter W. Hunt, Steven G. Deeks, Joseph K. Wong, Steven A. Yukl

Latently-infected CD4+ T cells are widely considered to be the major barrier to a cure for HIV. Much of our understanding of HIV latency comes from latency models and blood cells, but most HIV-infected cells reside in lymphoid tissues such as (altro…)

by Fabio M. Gomes, Carolina Barillas-Mury

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by Marcelo Santos da Silva, Galadriel A. Hovel-Miner, Emma M. Briggs, Maria Carolina Elias, Richard McCulloch

Antigenic variation by variant surface glycoprotein (VSG) coat switching in African trypanosomes is one of the most elaborate immune evasion strategies found among pathogens. Changes in the identity of the transcribed VSG gene, which is always flanked by 70-bp and telomeric repeats, can be achieved either by transcriptional or DNA recombination mechanisms. The major route of (altro…)

by Manoj K. Singh, Sandra Richter, Hauke Beckmann, Marika Kientz, York-Dieter Stierhof, Nadine Anders, Florian Fäßler, Michael Nielsen, Christian Knöll, Alexis Thomann, Mirita Franz-Wachtel, Boris Macek, Karen Skriver, Peter Pimpl, Gerd Jürgens

In eukaryotes, GTP-bound ARF GTPases promote intracellular membrane traffic by mediating the recruitment of coat proteins, which in turn sort cargo proteins into the forming membrane vesicles. Mammals employ several classes of ARF GTPases which are activated by different ARF (altro…)

by Ananda Kishore Mukherjee, Shalu Sharma, Suman Sengupta, Dhurjhoti Saha, Pankaj Kumar, Tabish Hussain, Vivek Srivastava, Sumitabho Deb Roy, Jerry W. Shay, Shantanu Chowdhury

Telomere-binding proteins constituting the shelterin complex have been studied primarily for telomeric functions. However, mounting evidence shows non-telomeric binding and gene regulation by shelterin factors. This raises a key question—do telomeres impact binding of shelterin proteins at distal non-telomeric sites? Here we show that binding of the telomere-repeat-binding-factor-2 (altro…)

by J. Arvid Ågren, Andrew G. Clark

Selfish genetic elements (historically also referred to as selfish genes, ultra-selfish genes, selfish DNA, parasitic DNA, genomic outlaws) are genetic segments that can enhance their own transmission at the expense of other genes in the genome, even if this has no or a negative effect on organismal fitness. [1–6] Genomes have traditionally been viewed as cohesive units, with genes acting together to improve the fitness (altro…)

by Nils Klughammer, Johanna Bischof, Nikolas D. Schnellbächer, Andrea Callegari, Péter Lénárt, Ulrich S. Schwarz

Cytoplasmic flows are an ubiquitous feature of biological systems, in particular in large cells, such as oocytes and eggs in early animal development. Here we show that cytoplasmic flows in starfish oocytes, which can be imaged well with transmission light microscopy, are fully determined by the cortical dynamics during surface contraction waves. We first show that the (altro…)

by Marieke A. Frassl, David P. Hamilton, Blaize A. Denfeld, Elvira de Eyto, Stephanie E. Hampton, Philipp S. Keller, Sapna Sharma, Abigail S. L. Lewis, Gesa A. Weyhenmeyer, Catherine M. O’Reilly, Mary E. Lofton, Núria Catalán

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by Denise Carvalho-Silva, Leyla Garcia, Sarah L. Morgan, Cath Brooksbank, Ian Dunham

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by Haleh Ebadi, Michael Perry, Keith Short, Konstantin Klemm, Claude Desplan, Peter F. Stadler, Anita Mehta

While most processes in biology are highly deterministic, stochastic mechanisms are sometimes used to increase cellular diversity. In human and Drosophila eyes, photoreceptors sensitive to different wavelengths of light are distributed in stochastic patterns, and one such patterning system has been analyzed in detail in the Drosophila retina. Interestingly, some species in the dipteran family Dolichopodidae (altro…)

by Tracy Chih-Ting Koubkova-Yu, Jung-Chi Chao, Jun-Yi Leu

Biological processes in living cells are often carried out by gene networks in which signals and reactions are integrated through network hubs. Despite their functional importance, it remains unclear to what extent network hubs are evolvable and how alterations impact long-term evolution. We investigated these issues using heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90), a central hub of proteostasis networks. When native Hsp90 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (altro…)

by Aashish R. Jha, Emily R. Davenport, Yoshina Gautam, Dinesh Bhandari, Sarmila Tandukar, Katharine M. Ng, Gabriela K. Fragiadakis, Susan Holmes, Guru Prasad Gautam, Jeff Leach, Jeevan Bahadur Sherchand, Carlos D. Bustamante, Justin L. Sonnenburg

The composition of the gut microbiome in industrialized populations differs from those living traditional lifestyles. However, it has been difficult to separate the contributions of human genetic and geographic factors from lifestyle. Whether shifts away from the (altro…)