Langat virus (LGT) strain TP21 is the most attenuated of the tick-borne flaviviruses for humans. Even though LGT has low-level neurovirulence for humans, it, and its more attenuated egg-passage derivative, strain E5, exhibit significant neurovirulence and neuroinvasiveness in normal mice, albeit less than that associated with tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV), the most virulent of the tick-b...

Capitate glandular trichomes of sunflower are well investigated, but detailed studies are lacking for the linear glandular trichomes (LGT), a second type of physiologically active plant hair present on the surface of sunflowers. Light, fluorescence and scanning electron microscopy as well as histochemical staining were used to investigate the structure and metabolite deposition of LGT. Consisti...

BACKGROUND Lateral gene transfer (LGT) is thought to promote speciation in bacteria, though well-defined examples have not been put forward. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPLE FINDINGS We examined the evolutionary history of the genes essential for a trait that defines a phylogenetic order, namely fruiting body development of the Myxococcales. Seventy-eight genes that are essential for Myxococcus xanthus ...

Lateral gene transfer (LGT) is a common mechanism of nonvertical evolution, during which genetic material is transferred between two more or less distantly related organisms. It is particularly common in bacteria where it contributes to adaptive evolution with important medical implications. In evolutionary studies, LGT has been shown to create widespread discordance between gene trees as genom...

Thymidylate synthases (Thy) are key enzymes in the synthesis of deoxythymidylate, 1 of the 4 building blocks of DNA. As such, they are essential for all DNA-based forms of life and therefore implicated in the hypothesized transition from RNA genomes to DNA genomes. Two evolutionally unrelated Thy enzymes, ThyA and ThyX, are known to catalyze the same biochemical reaction. Both enzymes are spora...

The widespread presence of antibiotic resistance and virulence among Staphylococcus isolates has been attributed in part to lateral genetic transfer (LGT), but little is known about the broader extent of LGT within this genus. Here we report the first systematic study of the modularity of genetic transfer among 13 Staphylococcus genomes covering four distinct named species. Using a topology-bas...

In addition to causing severe invasive infections in humans, Streptococcus agalactiae, or group B Streptococcus (GBS), is also a major cause of bovine mastitis. Here we provide the first genome sequence for S. agalactiae isolated from a cow diagnosed with clinical mastitis (strain FSL S3-026). Comparison to eight S. agalactiae genomes obtained from human disease isolates revealed 183 genes spec...

We present the general framework and building blocks of a recent derivation of the fact that the SU(2) LGT is in a confining phase for all values of the coupling 0 < β < ∞, for space-time dimension d ≤ 4. The method employs approximate but explicitly computable RG decimations that are shown to constrain the exact partition function and order parameters from above and below, and flow from the we...

Flaviviruses cause many human diseases, including dengue fever, yellow fever, West Nile viral encephalitis, and hemorrhagic fevers, and are transmitted to their vertebrate hosts by infected mosquitoes and ticks. Domain III of the envelope protein (E-D3) is considered to be the primary viral determinant involved in the virus-host-cell receptor interaction, and thus represents an excellent target...

Most genes have attained their observed distribution among genomes by transmission from parent to offspring through time. In prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea), however, some genes are where they are as the result of transfer from an unrelated lineage. To elucidate the biological origins and functional consequences of lateral gene transfer (LGT), we have constructed an automated computational p...