A locust can make a tasty morsel for a hungry predator, so being able to notice potentially dangerous looming objects and trigger the correct response could save a locust’s life. In locusts, a visual neuron called the descending contralateral movement detector (DCMD) spikes in response to looming objects and could therefore be the trigger for escape responses. Tomas Money and colleagues at Quee...

One model of transformation proposed that heat shock destabilizes the cell membrane and allows for plasmid uptake. As lipid composition might also affect the stability of the cell membrane, we hypothesized that a lower growth temperature would alter membrane lipid composition so as to increase transformation efficiency after heat shock. Cells were grown at 20°C and 37°C and treated with calcium...

A locust can make a tasty morsel for a hungry predator, so being able to notice potentially dangerous looming objects and trigger the correct response could save a locust’s life. In locusts, a visual neuron called the descending contralateral movement detector (DCMD) spikes in response to looming objects and could therefore be the trigger for escape responses. Tomas Money and colleagues at Quee...

The influence of single and double heat shocks induced during the exponential growth phase of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae fermentation of cultivar Sauvignon Blanc grape must was examined. Rapid temperature changes from 18 degrees C to 34 degrees C have been applied. The effect of the duration of exposure to a high temperature has been analyzed. By the applications of a single heat shock and a ...

The goal was to understand the role of heat shock at the zygote stage in causing infertility. Culture at 40°C reduced the percentage of inseminated oocytes that became a morula or blastocyst by d 6 or that were a blastocyst at d 8. An additional experiment was done to test whether effects of heat shock occur early in development or at the time of morula formation. Exposure to 40°C for 24 h decr...

The acceleration mechanism for protostellar out-flows is still uncertain, despite many dynamical studies. Active acceleration processes are expected to heat the molecular gas, and it should be possible to choose between the possible out-flow models by excitation studies which measure the temperature of the molecular gas. We show how temperature predictions can be made from a simple bow-shock dr...

The transcriptional induction of heat shock genes in eukaryotes is mediated by the heat shock transcription factor (HSF). In yeast, this induction appears to involve the phosphorylation of DNA-bound factor. I report here that HSF contains two distinct transcriptional activation regions. In response to a temperature upshift, an N-terminal region mediates transient increases in HSF activity and a...

The effects of heat shock on the synthesis of alpha-amylase and on the membranes of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) of barley (Hordeum vulgare) aleurone were studied. Heat shock, imposed by raising the temperature of incubation from 25 degrees C to 40 degrees C for 3 hours, inhibits the accumulation of alpha-amylase and other proteins in the incubation medium of barley aleurone layers treated wi...

The bacterial small heat shock protein IbpA protects client proteins from aggregation. Due to redundancy in the cellular chaperone network, deletion of the ibpA gene often leads to only a mild or no phenotypic defect. In this study, we show that a Pseudomonas putida ibpA deletion mutant has a severe growth defect under heat stress conditions and reduced survival during recovery revealing a crit...

Shocks are often simulated using the classical molecular dynamics (MD) method in which the electrons are not included explicitly and the interatomic interaction is described by an effective potential. As a result, the fast electronic heat conduction in metals and the coupling between the lattice vibrations and the electronic degrees of freedom can not be represented. Under conditions of steep t...