The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of eukaryotic phospholipid biosynthesis at an advanced level. Phospholipids make up the essential milieu of cellular membranes and act as a barrier for entry of compounds into cells. Phospholipids also function as precursors of second messengers such as diacylglycerol (DG) and inositol1,4,5-P3 which is covered in Chapter 12. A third, and u...

Recent advances in resolving the tree of eukaryotes are converging on a model composed of a few large hypothetical 'supergroups', each comprising a diversity of primarily microbial eukaryotes (protists, or protozoa and algae). The process of resolving the tree involves the synthesis of many kinds of data, including single-gene trees, multigene analyses, and other kinds of molecular and structur...

Cells need a constant supply of precursors to enable the production of macromolecules to sustain growth and survival. Unlike metazoans, unicellular eukaryotes depend exclusively on the extracellular medium for this supply. When environmental nutrients become depleted, existing cytoplasmic components will be catabolized by (macro)autophagy in order to re-use building blocks and to support ATP pr...

Diversity is one of the most significant features of life. The current assessment of biodiversity on Earth reaches several millions of living species, and an unimaginable number of species that have gone extinct. Further more, diversity is ingrained in all aspects of life, namely, genetics, metabolic needs, cell complexity, body plans and organismal morphology , developmental programs, behavior...

It was thought that polycistronic transcription is a characteristic of bacteria and archaea, where many of the genes are clustered in operons composed of two to more than ten genes. By contrast, the genes of eukaryotes are generally considered to be monocistronic, each with its own promoter at the 5' end and a transcription terminator at the 3' end; however, it has recently become clear that no...

Introduction Most eukaryotic chromosomes contain a specialized domain — the centromere — that mediates critical mitotic and meiotic functions, including kinetochore nucleation, spindle attachment, and sister chromatid cohesion. These processes ensure faithful chromosome partitioning during cell division. Intense scrutiny of the DNA and proteins that comprise the centromere revealed its fundamen...

was coined in 1920 (see Chapter 1), the general concept goes back at least as far as the 4th century BCE, when Aristotle implicated blood as the heredity substance. The blood of the mother, it was thought, supplied matter to the developing fetus whereas the semen (a purified form of blood) of the father conveyed form (Aristotle, 1953). Ironically, although the notions of “blood relations” and c...

The biological clock, present in nearly all eukaryotes, has evolved such that organisms can adapt to our planet's rotation in order to anticipate the coming day or night as well as unfavorable seasons. As all modern high-precision chronometers, the biological clock uses oscillation as a timekeeping element. In this review, we describe briefly the discovery, historical development, and general p...

Reverse genetics consists in the modification of the activity of a target gene to analyse the phenotypic consequences. Four main approaches are used towards this goal and will be explained in this review. Two of them are centred on genome alterations. Mutations produced by random chemical or insertional mutagenesis can be screened to recover only mutants in a specific gene of interest. Alternat...