While common in viral infections and neoplasia, spontaneous cell-cell fusion, or syncytialization, is quite restricted in healthy tissues. Such fusion is essential to human placental development, where interactions between trophoblast-specific human endogenous retroviral (HERV) envelope proteins, called syncytins, and their widely-distributed cell surface receptors are centrally involved. We ha...

Successful zygote formation during yeast mating requires cell fusion of the two haploid mating partners. To ensure that cells do not lyse as they remodel their cell wall, the fusion event is both temporally and spatially regulated: the cell wall is degraded only after cell-cell contact and only in the region of cell-cell contact. To understand how cell fusion is regulated, we identified mutants...

We previously reported the transient appearance of an actin superstructure, called the zipper-like structure, during the primary fusion (fusion of mononuclear precursors) and the secondary fusion (fusion of multinucleated cells) of osteoclasts. Here, we focus on the actin-based superstructures that link two precursor cells during the secondary fusion event. In one type of secondary fusion, the ...

Cell-cell fusion is essential for fertilization. For fusion of walled cells, the cell wall must be degraded at a precise location but maintained in surrounding regions to protect against lysis. In fission yeast cells, the formin Fus1, which nucleates linear actin filaments, is essential for this process. In this paper, we show that this formin organizes a specific actin structure-the actin fusi...

Amoebic gill disease (AGD) is the most important parasitic disease of Atlantic salmon industry inAustralia. Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) experimentally infected with Neoparamoeba sp. apparently showedAGD gross signs on the gill and an amoebic-associated gill pathology. Physico-chemical factors of waterduring the experiment were monitored regularly and were approximately constant (temperature: ...

Sambucus nigra (elder) are broadly used species to treat microbial infections. Thepotential antiviral activity and mechanism action of elder fruit (EF) in human epithelium cell(A549) cultures infected with H9N2 influenza virus were determined. The effect of variousconcentrations of EF on influenza virus replication was examined by using virus titration,quantitative real time RT-PCR, fusion and ...

Retroviral transmembrane proteins (TMs) contain an N-terminal fusion peptide that initiates virus-cell membrane fusion. The fusion peptide is linked to the coiled-coil core through a conserved sequence that is often rich in glycines. We investigated the functional role of the glycine-rich segment, Met-326 to Ser-337, of the human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1) TM, gp21, by alanine and pr...

Cell-cell fusion is fundamental to the development and physiology of multicellular organisms, but little is known of its mechanistic underpinnings. Recent studies have revealed that many proteins involved in cell-cell fusion are also required for seemingly unrelated cellular processes such as phagocytosis, cell migration, axon growth, and synaptogenesis. We review advances in understanding cell...

the fusion of medical images is very useful for clinical application. generally, the pet image indicates the function of tissue and the mri image shows the anatomy of tissue. in this article we fused mri and pet images and the purpose is adding structural information from mri to pet image. the images decomposed with curvelet transform, and then two images fused with applying fusion rules. we us...

Increasing evidence and indications showed that cell fusion is crucial in tumor development and metastasis, and hypoxia, a closely linked factor to tumor microenvironment, which can lead to EMT, induces angiogenesis and metastasis in tumor growth. However, the relationship between hypoxia and fusion has not been reported yet. EMT will change some proteins in the epithelial cell surface and the ...