Critical infrastructures of today’s society are built over networks that require a degree of survivability not foreseen when they were built. This paper reports on work in progress in a European project that aims to safeguard critical infrastructures such as electricity and telecom networks. It assumes that there will be accidents, attacks, and failures in parts of a network. The goal of safegu...

Many more platelets are present in healthy mammals than are necessary for routine haemostasis. Thus, they could have other functions. Platelets have many of the attributes of innate immune function including Toll-like receptors. They also contain a wide range of anti-microbial peptides in storage granules. Platelets play an important role in bacterial infections, both in disease progress and in...

Plants are host to a large amount of pathogenic bacteria. Fire blight, caused by the bacterium Erwinia amylovora, is an important disease in Rosaceae. Pathogenicity of E. amylovora is greatly influenced by the production of exopolysaccharides, such as amylovoran, and the use of the type III secretion system, which enables bacteria to penetrate host tissue and cause disease. When infection takes...

We examined the putative defence system of a king cricket, Onosandrus sp., in particular the efficacy of the noxious faeces against two types of predator: a lizard, the skink Mabuya striata (an active, diurnal forager), and the toad Bufo gutturalis (a nocturnal, ambush predator). Contrary to our predictions, the faeces did not act as a deterrent to either predator. Tongueflick trials with cotto...

The cellulose-binding domains (CBDs) in the Phytophthora cellulose-binding elicitor lectin (CBEL) are potent elicitors of plant defence responses. Induction of defence has also been reported in various cellulose-deficient mutants of Arabidopsis thaliana. Based on these observations, we propose a model linking cellulose alteration to defence induction. This integrates the fast increase in cytoso...

Hosts have evolved a diverse range of defence mechanisms in response to challenge by infectious organisms (parasites and pathogens). Whether defence is through avoidance of infection, control of the growth of the parasite once infected, clearance of the infection, tolerance to the disease caused by infection or innate and/or acquired immunity, it will have important implications for the populat...

Infectious diseases occur when a pathogen overwhelms a host`s immune response, establishes a local niche, replicates and spreads over the whole body. Immunocompromised people are especially in danger to develop severe pathologies. An important factor influencing the immune defence is the diet. In particular polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) are believed to play a key role in modulating immune ...