A wide variety of signaling pathways regulate immune and stress response in invertebrates and vertebrates. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are extensively utilized model organisms for studies of such signaling pathways in invertebrates. Intriguingly, major signaling pathways in immune response in Drosophila and C. elegans, as represented by the Toll...

Autophagy is a cellular pathway that leads to the degradation of proteins and organelles. This process is usually involved in the maintenance of cell homeostasis when the organism experiences nutrient starvation, but in holometabolous insects autophagy also intervenes in the demolition of larval tissues and organs during metamorphosis. This review summarizes the current knowledge about autophag...

Betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) belongs to the aldehyde dehydrogenases (ALDH) family, an ancestral group of enzymes responsible for aldehyde detoxification in several organisms. The BADH enzyme catalyzes the irreversible oxidation of betaine aldehyde to glycine betaine (GB) an important osmoptrotector and osmoregulator accumulated in response to cellular osmotic stress. The BADH enzymes h...

Insulin/Insulin-like growth factors play important roles in promoting proliferation, differentiation, growth and development of organisms. In this article, bioinformatics analysis was performed to locate and identify the Bombyx mori insulin-like peptide (BmILP) gene, which had two introns, three exons, and a predicted signal peptide at the front, and it also determined that BmILP was the same t...

abstract soybean (glycine max) is an important crop plant which contains a high amount of oil and protein. to evaluate the genetic diversity of 45 soybean genotypes growing in iran, two types of molecular markers (rapd and isj) were used. two sets of different primers were used to compare potential differentiation power of it (intron targeting) and et (exon targeting) primers. data obtained fro...

Echinoderms are exclusively marine animals that, after the chordates, represent the second largest group of deuterostomes. Their diverse species composition and singular ecological niches provide at the same time challenges and rewards when studying the broad range of responses that make up their immune mechanisms. Two types of responses comprise the immune system of echinoderms: a cellular res...

The immune and neuroendocrine systems of invertebrates, as well as vertebrates, share a common pool of molecules that have been conserved throughout evolution. Now we add a new interface to this bidirectional interaction, demonstrating the involvement of the gut system, showing that these three systems use the same biologically active peptides.