Phosphate is required for many important cellular processes and having too little phosphate or too much can cause disease and reduce life span in humans. However, the mechanisms underlying homeostatic control of extracellular phosphate levels and cellular effects of phosphate are poorly understood. Here, we establish Drosophila melanogaster as a model system for the study of phosphate effects. ...

Creative thinking plays a vital role in almost all aspects of human life. However, little is known about the neural and genetic mechanisms underlying creative thinking. Based on a cross-validation based predictive framework, we searched from the whole-brain connectome (34,716 functional connectivities) and whole genome data (309,996 SNPs) in two datasets (all collected by Southwest University, ...

Recently, the expression of the peptide hormone ghrelin was detected in a-cells of the islets of Langerhans as well as in q-cells, a newly discovered endocrine cell type, but it remains unclear how the latter is related in lineage to the four classical islet cell types, a-, h-, y-, and PPcells. Here, we provide further evidence that ghrelin is predominantly produced in the a-cells of mouse isle...

Cognitive skills such as tool use, syntactical languages, and self-awareness differentiate humans from other primates. The underlying basis for this cognitive difference has been widely associated with a high encephalization quotient and an anatomically distinct, exceptionally large cerebral cortex. Investigations on congenital microcephaly had revealed several genes that affect mammalian brain...

Copyright © 2016, Infection, Epidemiology and Medicine; Tarbiat Modares University. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited. Genetic Determinants Differences between Vibrio chol...

The risk for alcohol dependence throughout development is determined by both genetic and environmental factors. Genetic factors that are thought to modulate this risk act on neurobiological pathways regulating reward, impulsivity, and stress responses. For example, genetic variations in pathways using the brain signaling molecule (i.e., neurotransmitter) dopamine, which likely mediate alcohol's...

Hepatitis B is a major public health problem. Approximately one-third of the world’s population has serological evidence of infection with hepatitis B virus (HBV). 350 million of these are carriers who have chronic HBV infection, and about a million of these carriers die each year from chronic liver disease, including cirrhosis and liver cancer. Fortunately, HBV is a vaccine preventable disease...

The present paper is a review of current knowledge about the relations between gene polymorphism and predisposition for ischemic heart disease. Many studies investigate polymorphic variants of genes whose protein products contribute to the genesis and development of atherosclerosis of coronary arteries, thrombogenesis and fibrinolysis and other processes significant for the progression of ische...

In our ongoing effort to identify genes influencing the biological pathways that underlie the metabolic disturbances associated with obesity, we performed genome-wide scanning in 2,209 individuals distributed over 507 Caucasian families to localize quantitative trait loci (QTLs), which affect variation of plasma lipids. Pedigree-based analysis using a quantitative trait variance component linka...