The glycome is defined as the glycan repertoire of cells, tissues, and organisms, as found under specified conditions. The vastly diverse glycome is generated by a nontemplate driven biosynthesis, which is indirectly encoded in the genome, and very dynamic. Due to this overwhelming diversity, glycomic analysis must be approached at different hierarchical levels of complexity. In this review fiv...

A common question about root resorption is raised in orthodontic practice: What is more important, the intensity of force or its distribution along the root, periodontal and alveolar structures? Diffuse distribution of forces applied to periodontal tissues during tooth movement tends not to promote neither extensive areas of cell matrix hyalinization nor significant death of cementoblasts that ...

The prevalence of obesity has risen dramatically in the United States.1 This has led to a marked increase in the metabolic syndrome (MetSyn), a clustering of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk factors characterized by visceral adiposity, insulin resistance, low HDL cholesterol (HDL-C), and a systemic proinflammatory state.2 In the United States, the MetSyn affects roughly 25% of adults...

Why is a particular architecture for a pathway chosen over seemingly equivalent alternatives? Cağatay et al. (2009) use a synthetic biology approach to show that fluctuations--or noise--in protein levels may play a key role in determining which network design is selected during evolution.

Plants can develop an enhanced defensive capacity in response to infection by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). This 'mycorrhiza-induced resistance' (MIR) provides systemic protection against a wide range of attackers and shares characteristics with systemic acquired resistance (SAR) after pathogen infection and induced systemic resistance (ISR) following root colonisation by non-pathogenic r...

Mutual information and its causal variant, directed information, have been widely used to quantitatively characterize the performance of biological sensing and information transduction. However, once coupled with selection in response to decisionmaking, the sensing signal could have more or less evolutionary value than its mutual or directed information. In this work, we show that an individual...