Transcription can be quite disruptive for chromatin so cells have evolved mechanisms to preserve chromatin integrity during transcription, thereby preventing the emergence of cryptic transcripts from spurious promoter sequences. How these transcripts are regulated and processed remains poorly characterized. Notably, very little is known about the termination of cryptic transcripts. Here, we use...

BACKGROUND Fully asexually reproducing taxa lack outcrossing. Hence, the classic Biological Species Concept cannot be applied. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We used DNA sequences from the mitochondrial COI gene and the nuclear ITS2 region to check species boundaries according to the evolutionary genetic (EG) species concept in five morphospecies in the putative ancient asexual ostracod gener...

CD4 T cells are crucial to the control of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection and are a key component of current vaccine strategies. Conversely, immune-mediated pathology drives disease, and recent evidence suggests that adaptive and innate responses are evolutionarily beneficial to M. tuberculosis. We compare the functionality of CD4 T cell responses mounted against dominant and cryptic epito...

We have developed a differential display screening approach to identify mesoderm-specific genes, relying upon the differentiation of embryonic stem (ES) cells in vitro. Using this strategy, we have isolated a novel murine gene that encodes a secreted molecule containing a variant epidermal growth factor-like (EGF) motif. We named this gene Cryptic, based on its predicted protein sequence simila...

Tumor Associated Antigens (TAAs) are the privileged targets of almost all the cancer vaccines tested to date. Unfortunately all these vaccines failed to show a clinical efficacy. The main reason for this failure is the immune tolerance to TAAs that are self-proteins expressed by normal and cancer cells. Self-tolerance to TAAs is directed against their dominant rather than against their cryptic ...

Identifying units of biological diversity is a major goal of organismal biology. An increasing literature has focused on the importance of cryptic diversity, defined as the presence of deeply diverged lineages within a single species. While most discoveries of cryptic lineages proceed on a taxon-by-taxon basis, rapid assessments of biodiversity are needed to inform conservation policy and decis...

BACKGROUND The Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, is a vector of dengue, Chikungunya, and Zika viruses. This mosquito inhabits a wide range of artificial water-holding containers in urban and suburban areas making it difficult to control. We tested the hypothesis that female-driven autodissemination of an insect growth regulator could penetrate cryptic oviposition habitats difficult to tre...

Cryptic genes are silenced genes that can still be reactivated by mutation. Since they can make no positive contribution to the fitness of their carriers, it is not clear why many cryptic genes in microbial populations have not degenerated into useless DNA sequences. Hall et al. (1983) have suggested that cryptic genes have persisted because of occasional strong environmental selection for reac...

The discovery of morphologically very similar but genetically distinct species complicates a proper understanding of the link between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Cryptic species have been frequently observed to co-occur and are thus expected to be ecological equivalent. The marine nematode Halomonhystera disjuncta contains five cryptic species (GD1-5) that co-occur in the Westersche...

It has been recently stated that stress-responding genes in yeast are enriched in cryptic transcripts and that this is the cause of the differences observed between mRNA amount and RNA polymerase occupancy profiles. Other studies have shown that such differences are mainly due to modulation of mRNA stabilities. Here we analyze the relationship between the presence of cryptic transcripts in gene...