Spiny slipper shells in the genus Bostrycapulus range worldwide in tropical and temperate oceans. Owing to the scarcity of samples that retain the defining characteristics of the genus, the species from tropical Africa and the Indo-Pacific are poorly known. Here we present data showing that samples of Bostrycapulus from the Cape Verde Islands and Senegal are distinct from each other and distinc...

AIM The aim of this experimental animal model study is to investigate the effects of caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE) and melatonin on the maturation of newly-formed regenerated bone in distraction osteogenesis. METHODS Unilateral femoral lengthening(extension) was applied to 39 adult male Wistar albino rats, which were randomly allocated to 3 groups of 13; control, melatonin and CAPE grou...

Hypertrophic obesity inhibits activation of peroxisome proliferators-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ), considered the key mediator of the fully differentiated and insulin sensitive adipocyte phenotype. We examined the effects of Caffeic Acid Phenethyl Ester (Cape), isolated from propolis, a honeybee hive product, on Adipose Stem Cells (ASCs) differentiation to the adipocyte lineage. Finally we ...

Genotyping of multidrug-resistant (MDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains isolated from tuberculosis (TB) patients in four South African provinces (Western Cape, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and Gauteng) revealed a distinct population structure of the MDR strains in all four regions, despite the evidence of substantial human migration between these settings. In all analyzed provinces, a negati...

Neonatal hypoxic-ischaemic (HI) brain injury resulting in encephalopathy is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality with no effective treatment. Here we show that caffeic acid phenethyl ester (CAPE), an active component of propolis, administered either before or after an HI insult, significantly prevents HI-induced neonatal rat brain damage in the cortex, hippocampus and thalamus. In additio...

1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, 2 Centre for High Performance Computing, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Cape Town, South Africa, 3 Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Wallenberg Research Centre at Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 4 Center for Computational Imaging and Simulation Technologies in...

The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question when hominins first developed this ability still remains. Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence--in the form of burned b...

It seems that it’s not just elephants that have long memories. Research by Anthony Gendall and co-workers [Cell (2001) 107, 525–535] shows that plants have a remarkable capacity to ‘remember’ too. Studying the process of vernalization (the acceleration of flowering by exposure to a cold period) in Arabidopsis, the team has identified the ‘memory’ gene, VRN2 (vernalization2). Although VRN2 is no...

*Deenan Pillay, Joshua Herbeck, Myron S Cohen, Tulio de Oliveira, Christophe Fraser, Oliver Ratmann, Andrew Leigh Brown, Paul Kellam, on behalf of the PANGEA-HIV Consortium Wellcome Trust-Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa (DP, TdO); Division of Infection and Immunity, University College London, London, UK (DP, TdO); Department of ...

Communities in South Africa, especially those in Limpopo and Northern Cape, have been decimated by the mining operations of Cape Plc. South African victims of asbestos-related disease have only recently begun to be awarded (modest) compensation settlements through litigation, as a result of collective efforts on their behalf. The tortuous case of Cape, which knowingly exposed thousands of innoc...