The amphibian, Xenopus laevis has been an excellent developmental model for over half a century. The large egg size, external fertilization and simple husbandry make this frog an ideal tool to study early vertebrate development. The tetraploid genome and long generation time, however, has hindered the use of X. laevis in large-scale genetic efforts. A close West African relative, Xenopus tropic...

Nagata, Katsumi, Naohiro Hori, Kenzo Sato, Kunimasa Ohta, Hideaki Tanaka, and Yasutake Hiji. Cloning and functional expression of an SGLT-1-like protein from the Xenopus laevis intestine. Am. J. Physiol. 276 (Gastrointest. Liver Physiol. 39): G1251–G1259, 1999.—A cDNA encoding an Na1-glucose cotransporter type 1 (SGLT-1)-like protein was cloned from the Xenopus laevis intestine by the 58and 38-...

In developing clawed toads Xenopus laevis, the compensation mechanism of behavioural defects caused by unilateral labyrinthectomy consists of two components, a vestibular one and a hormonal one. Thyroxine accelerates this compensation.

Motivated by the graded posteriorization during the AP axis development in the frog Xenopus laevis, we propose an abstract Petri net model for the formation of a gradient of proteins in a chain of cells.

The presence of the opioids, beta-endorphin, met-enkephalin, and endomorphin, and of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and the CRF family member, urocortin (Ucn), is described in cerebrospinal fluid-contacting neurons in the brain of the amphibian, Xenopus laevis.

The amphibian Xenopus provides a model organism for investigating microRNA expression during vertebrate embryogenesis and development. Searching available Xenopus genome databases using known human pre-miRNAs as query sequences, more than 300 genes encoding 142 Xenopus tropicalis miRNAs were identified. Analysis of Xenopus tropicalis miRNA genes revealed a predominate positioning within introns...

In Xenopus laevis, corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF) and urocortin 1 are present in the brain and they both are potent stimulators of alpha-melanophore stimulating hormone (MSH) secretion by melanotroph cells in the pituitary gland. Because both CRF and urocortin 1 bind with high affinity to CRF receptor type 1 (CRF1) in mammals and Xenopus laevis, one of the purposes of the present study w...

INTRODUCTION In this study, we focused on the medically important problem of long bone wound healing by regeneration. We employed a small animal in vivo load-bearing model to study the effect of a biocompatible artificial polymer scaffold on regeneration of critical size defects in adult Xenopus laevis frog hind limbs. The long-term goal is to repair large segmental critical size (non-regenerat...

Transposable elements comprise a large proportion of animal genomes. Transposons can have detrimental effects on genome stability but also offer positive roles for genome evolution and gene expression regulation. Proper balance of the positive and deleterious effects of transposons is crucial for cell homeostasis and requires a mechanism that tightly regulates their expression. Herein we descri...

Functional characterisation of proteins and large-scale, systems-level studies are enabled by extensive sets of cloned open reading frames (ORFs) in an easily-accessible format that enables many different applications. Here we report the release of the first stage of the Xenopus ORFeome, which contains 8673 ORFs from the Xenopus Gene Collection (XGC) for Xenopus laevis, cloned into a Gateway® d...