Protist Evolution: Stealing Genes to Gut It Out

Protist Evolution: Stealing Genes to Gut It Out

The amount and evolutionary impact of horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotes remain contentious issues. A new phylogenomic study suggests that gene transfer from prokaryotes has contributed significantly to the adaptation and metabolic evolution of Blastocystis, the most widespread human gut eukaryotic parasite.

Puzzling It Out: Supporting Ontology Evolution with Applications to eGovernment

In recent years, the use of ontologies in information systems has dramatically increased. Ontology design and maintenance, nonetheless, have been and still are daunting tasks. We argue that ontologies need to evolve, or else the semantic infrastructure of the information system will no longer support the organization’s changing needs. Therefore, in this work we aim at tackling the problem of on...

Dishing it out to allergies.

Allergic diseases encompass a group of disorders common in childhood, including eczema, asthma, and allergic rhinoconjunctivitis (ARC). Though disparate in presentation, these disorders share a common biologic origin, and over the past quarter century this group of disorders has grown from relative obscurity to near ubiquity, with a lifetime prevalence approaching 20% in school-age children in ...

Sorting it out

The AP-2 adaptor complex is widely viewed as a linchpin molecule in clathrin-mediated endocytosis, simultaneously binding both clathrin and receptors. This dual interaction couples cargo capture with clathrin coat assembly, but it has now been discovered that the association with cargo is tightly regulated. Remarkably, AP-2 is not obligatory for all clathrin-mediated uptake, and several alterna...

Just Out of It