The innate immune system is the first line of defense against microorganisms and is conserved in plants and animals. The nucleotide-binding domain, leucine rich containing (NLR) protein family is a recent addition to the members of innate immunity effector molecules. These proteins are characterized by a central oligomerization domain, termed nucleotide-binding domain (NBD) and a protein intera...

Aerial and satellite imagery are widely used to assess the severity and impact of wildfires. Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a newer remote sensing technology that has demonstrated utility in measuring vegetation structure. Combined use of imagery and LiDAR may improve the assessment of wildfire impacts compared to imagery alone. Estimation of tree mortality at the plot scale could serve...

Agents that activate dendritic cells are essential components for vaccines and can be conceptualized as molecular adjuvants. Other molecular adjuvants affect downstream factors that shape the resulting immune response. This review provides a compendium of recently studied molecular adjuvants, focusing on CD8+ T cell responses, which have important roles in HIV vaccines. Reference is also made t...

NLR family apoptosis inhibitory proteins (NAIPs) belong to both the Nod-like receptor (NLR) and the inhibitor of apoptosis (IAP) families. NAIPs are known to form an inflammasome with NLRC4, but other in vivo functions remain unexplored. Using mice deficient for all NAIP paralogs (Naip1-6(Δ/Δ)), we show that NAIPs are key regulators of colorectal tumorigenesis. Naip1-6(Δ/Δ) mice developed incre...

Recently, a spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) determining gene, termed survival motor neuron (SMN) gene, has been isolated from the 5q13 region and found deleted in most patients. A highly homologous copy of this gene has also been isolated and located in a centromeric position. We have analyzed 158 patients (SMA types I-IV) and found deletions of SMN exon 7 in 96.8%. Mutations other than gross del...

Satellite data have been widely used in the detection of vegetation area changes, however, the lack of historical training samples seriously limits detection accuracy. In this research, an iterative intersection analysis algorithm (IIAA) is proposed to solve this problem, and employed to improve the change detection accuracy of Phragmites area in the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge ...

Inhibitors of apoptosis (IAPs) are a diverse group of signaling molecules that function in a wide range of cellular roles, from the inhibition of caspases to the promotion of cell-cycle progression. These diverse functions may well be linked to the many different domains that are contained within different proteins in the family. IAP family members were first described as inhibitors of apoptosi...

NAIP CIIA HET-E and TP1 (NACHT) family proteins are involved in sensing intracellular pathogens or pathogen-derived molecules, triggering host defense responses resulting in caspase-mediated processing of proinflammatory cytokines and NF-kappaB activation. Caspase-associated recruitment domain, leucine-rich repeat, and NACHT-containing protein (CLAN), also known as ICE protease-activating facto...

We generated two hiPSC clones from a patient with sporadic late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD-iPSCs), which expressed typical undifferentiated markers and passed standard pluripotency assays. Genome-wide microarray analysis revealed that AD-iPSCs were highly similar to control hiPSCs and hESCs, albeit with some noticeable differences in few genes, viz.: DNAJC15, GRPR, NAIP and SNORD116-18. Seve...

Objective: To explore the diagnostic features and inheritance patterns of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) in children at three tertiary care public hospitals. Study Design: Retrospective study. Setting: HITEC Institute Medical Sciences Taxila Cantt. Period: January 2022 to March 2022. Material & Methods: A retrospective review medical records past ten years from 2011 December 2020 hospitals w...