Publications by authors named "Ariane Boehm"
Article Synopsis
- Mating in female animals, particularly fruit flies, does not cause a widespread increase in brain activity, but it specifically alters the response of neurons related to pheromones and learning.
- Mating enhances attraction to nutrient-related odors (like polyamines), and if the female's ability to smell important pheromones is hindered, this reduces her preference for these nutrients even days later.
- Dopaminergic neurons play a key role in maintaining this preference, with certain brain regions modulating how mated and virgin females respond to odors, demonstrating that sensory experiences during mating can shape future behavior and choices.
Animals rely heavily on their sense of olfaction to perform various vital interactions with an ever-in-flux environment. The turbulent and combinatorial nature of air-borne odorant cues demands the employment of various coding strategies, which allow the animal to attune to its internal needs and past or present experiences. Furthermore, these internal needs can be dependent on internal states such as hunger, reproductive state and sickness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Any method that de novo predicts protein function should do better than random. More challenging, it also ought to outperform simple homology-based inference.
Methods: Here, we describe a few methods that predict protein function exclusively through homology.
Automated annotation of protein function is challenging. As the number of sequenced genomes rapidly grows, the overwhelming majority of protein products can only be annotated computationally. If computational predictions are to be relied upon, it is crucial that the accuracy of these methods be high.
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