Search results for "Biochemical"
showing 10 items of 870 documents
Host plant variation plastically impacts different traits of the immune system of a phytophagous insect
2011
Summary 1. Host plant quality affects herbivorous insect performance and consequently their susceptibility to natural enemies. Recently, it has been hypothesized that the immune function of herbivorous insects can be altered by their host plant, thus generating variation in their susceptibility to entomopathogens. Previous studies testing this hypothesis provided contradictory outcomes, mainly as a result of the differences in methodology such as measuring a single-immune parameter rather than considering trade-off-mediated interactions between immune defence systems of the insect. Here, we hypothesized that plant-mediated changes in insect immunity could result from the alteration of physi…
Consensus-Based Distributed State Estimation of Biofilm in Reverse Osmosis Membranes by WSNs
2017
The appearance of biofilm has become a serious problem in many reverse osmosis based systems such as the ones found in water treatment and desalination plants. In these systems, the use of traditional techniques such as pretreatment or dozing biocides are not effective when the biofilm reaches an irreversible attachment phase. In this work, we present a framework for the use of a WSN as an estimator of the biofilm evolution in a reverse osmosis membrane so that effective solutions can be applied before the irreversible phase is attained. This design is addressed in a complete distributed and decentralized fashion, and subject to realistic constraints where cooperation between nodes is perfo…
Cytoplasmic incompatibility between Old and New World populations of a tramp ant
2020
Reproductive manipulation by endosymbiotic Wolbachia can cause unequal inheritance, allowing the manipulator to spread and potentially impacting evolutionary dynamics in infected hosts. Tramp and invasive species are excellent models to study the dynamics of host-Wolbachia associations because introduced populations often diverge in their microbiomes after colonizing new habitats, resulting in infection polymorphisms between native and introduced populations. Ants are the most abundant group of insects on earth, and numerous ant species are classified as highly invasive. However, little is known about the role of Wolbachia in these ecologically dominant insects. Here, we provide the first d…
Happens in the best of subfamilies: establishment and repeated replacements of co-obligate secondary endosymbionts within Lachninae aphids.
2016
SummaryVirtually all aphids maintain an obligate mutualistic symbiosis with bacteria from theBuchneragenus, which produce essential nutrients for their aphid hosts. Most aphids from the Lachninae subfamily have been consistently found to house additional endosymbionts, mainlySerratia symbiotica. This apparent dependence on secondary endosymbionts was proposed to have been triggered by the loss of the riboflavin biosynthetic capability byBuchnerain the Lachninae last common ancestor. However, an integral large-scale analysis of secondary endosymbionts in the Lachninae is still missing, hampering the interpretation of the evolutionary and genomic analyses of these endosymbionts. Here, we anal…
The Recent Development of a Sweet-Tasting Brazzein and its Potential Industrial Applications
2016
International audience; Brazzein is a small heat- and pH-stable sweet-tasting protein isolated from the West African plant, Pentadiplandra brazzeana. Brazzein combines a highly sweet potency, a long history of human consumption, and a remarkable stability, giving it great potential as a natural sweetener. Due to the difficulties of obtaining brazzein from its natural source, several efforts have been made to express brazzein using various heterologous expression systems. This chapter describes the biochemical, structural, sensory, and physiological properties of brazzein. We will summarize the current knowledge of the structure-activity relationship of brazzein. The biotechnological product…
BIOAEROSOL
2017
Cultural heritage constitutive materials can provide excellent substrates for microbial colonisation, highly influenced by thermo-hygrometric parameters. In cultural heritage-related environments, a detrimental microbial load may be present both on manufact surface and in the aerosol. Confined environments (museums, archives, deposits, caves, hypogea) have peculiar structures and dif- ferent thermo-hygrometric parameters, influencing the development of a wide range of microbial species, able to induce artefact biodeterioration and to release biological particles in the aerosol (spores, cellular debrides, toxins, allergens) potentially dangerous for the human health (visitors/users). In orde…
Urinary 1H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Metabolomic Fingerprinting Reveals Biomarkers of Pulse Consumption Related to Energy-Metabolism Modulation in a…
2017
Little is known about the metabolome fingerprint of pulse consumption. The study of robust and accurate biomarkers for pulse dietary assessment has great value for nutritional epidemiology regarding health benefits and their mechanisms. To characterize the fingerprinting of dietary pulses (chickpeas, lentils and beans), spot urine samples from a subcohort from the PREDIMED study were stratified, using a validated food frequency questionnaire. Non-pulse consumers (≤ 4 g/day of pulse intake) and habitual pulse consumers (≥ 25 g/day of pulse intake) were analysed using a 1H-NMR metabolomics approach combined with multi- and univariate data analysis. Pulse consumption showed differences through…
Eawag-Soil in enviPath: a new resource for exploring regulatory pesticide soil biodegradation pathways and half-life data.
2017
Developing models for the prediction of microbial biotransformation pathways and half-lives of trace organic contaminants in different environments requires as training data easily accessible and sufficiently large collections of respective biotransformation data that are annotated with metadata on study conditions. Here, we present the Eawag-Soil package, a public database that has been developed to contain all freely accessible regulatory data on pesticide degradation in laboratory soil simulation studies for pesticides registered in the EU (282 degradation pathways, 1535 reactions, 1619 compounds and 4716 biotransformation half-life values with corresponding metadata on study conditions)…
Downregulation of thioredoxin-1-dependent CD95 S-nitrosation by Sorafenib reduces liver cancer
2020
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) represents 80% of the primary hepatic neoplasms. It is the sixth most frequent neoplasm, the fourth cause of cancer-related death, and 7% of registered malignancies. Sorafenib is the first line molecular targeted therapy for patients in advanced stage of HCC. The present study shows that Sorafenib exerts free radical scavenging properties associated with the downregulation of nuclear factor E2-related factor 2 (Nrf2)-regulated thioredoxin 1 (Trx1) expression in liver cancer cells. The experimental downregulation and/or overexpression strategies showed that Trx1 induced activation of nitric oxide synthase (NOS) type 3 (NOS3) and S-nitrosation (SNO) of CD95 rece…
Melatonin Targets Metabolism in Head and Neck Cancer Cells by Regulating Mitochondrial Structure and Function.
2021
This study was funded by grants from the Ministerio de Economia, Industria y Competitividad y por el Fondo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER, Spain nº SAF2013-49019, SAF2017-85903-P, and from the Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Junta de Andalucía (P07- CTS- 03135, P10- CTS- 5784, and CTS- 101), Spain. J.F. and L.M. have FPU fellowships from the Ministerio de Educación Cultura y Deporte, Spain. C.R.S. was a schorlarship holder from the Plan Propio de Investigación of the University of Granada.