Although bacteriophages have been used for the treatment of patients with bacterial infections in some regions of the world for >9 decades, adequate clinical trials of the safety and efficacy of the treatment have not been reported. The increasing problem of antibiotic resistance has, however, rekindled interest in this approach to therapy. Although potentially significant obstacles to systemic...

combination of kinetic proofreading and induced fit in tRNA selection provides a suitable balance between fidelity and rapid elongation rates. If we take the simplest case of kinetic proofreading, where there are no differences in forward rate constants introduced by induced fit — where k 3 and k 5 are equivalent for both cognate and near-cognate tRNAs — significant discrimination between cogna...

BACKGROUND Animals living in areas contaminated by radioactive material from Chernobyl suffer from increased oxidative stress and low levels of antioxidants. Therefore, normal development of the nervous system is jeopardized as reflected by high frequencies of developmental errors, reduced brain size and impaired cognitive abilities in humans. Alternatively, associations between psychological e...

Life forms can be roughly differentiated into those that are microscopic versus those that are not as well as those that are multicellular and those that, instead, are unicellular. Cellular organisms seem generally able to host viruses, and this propensity carries over to those that are both microscopic and less than truly multicellular. These viruses of microorganisms, or VoMs, in fact exist a...