transforming growth factor betas are multifunctional polypeptides in the cytokine superfamily. they have a growth inhibitory role on hemopoietic progenitor cells in semisolid colony assay as well as in long-term bone-marrow culture. tgf - β2 represses stromal cells, stem cell factor gene transcription, and decreases the stability of c-kit transcripts in hemopoietic cells. tgf-β also modulates g...

The requirement to monitor the presence of genetically modified organisms (GMO) in a variety of marked products has generated an increasing demand for reliable, rapid, and time and cost-effective analytical methods. Here we report an on-site method for rapid detection of cauliflower mosaic virus promoter (CaMV 35S), a common element present in most GMO, using cross-priming amplification (CPA) t...

Over the past few years, genetically modified organisms (GMO) have gradually become more familiar after numerous reports of problems with GMO safety, such as genetically modified (GM) potatoes disrupting immunity, GM corn inducing tumors, and GM rice being fed to unwitting Chinese children. Every time, these reports cause panic among the population and lead to objections to GMO in various fora....

Understanding the trade-offs between organisms' life history traits has been a major goal of physiology, ecology and evolution. In the last few decades, two types of intra-specific studies have highlighted the trade-off between growth and longevity. First, diet restriction (DR), as an environmental intervention, has been shown to suppress growth and extend the lifespan of a broad range of anima...

We introduce a model for the dynamics of a patchy population in a stochastic environment and derive a criterion for its persistence. This criterion is based on the geometric mean (GM) through time of the spatial-arithmetic mean of growth rates. For the population to persist, the GM has to be >/=1. The GM increases with the number of patches (because the sampling error is reduced) and decreases ...

Little is known about the impacts of transgenic plants and micro-organisms on soil biota and processes, despite the large number of field releases of transgenic crops. Recent work has shown that transgenic plants can cause changes in the soil biota (both invertebrates and micro-organisms) associated with these plants. Often the changes are transient but their impact on the soil ecosystem remain...