The Skin and Intestinal Microbiota and Their Specific Innate Immune Systems.

The skin and intestine are active organs of the immune system that are constantly exposed to the outside environment. They support diverse microbiota, both commensal and pathogenic, which encompass bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. The skin and intestine must maintain homeostasis with the diversity of commensal organisms present on epithelial surfaces.

Molecular determinants of plaque size as an indicator of dengue virus attenuation.

The development of live viral vaccines relies on empirically derived phenotypic criteria, especially small plaque sizes, to indicate attenuation. However, while some candidate vaccines successfully translated into licensed applications, others have failed safety trials, placing vaccine development on a hit-or-miss trajectory. We examined the determinants of small plaque phenotype in two dengue virus (DENV) vaccine candidates, DENV-3 PGMK30FRhL3, which produced acute febrile illness in vaccine recipients, and DENV-2 PDK53, which has a good clinical safety profile.

Drosophila muller f elements maintain a distinct set of genomic properties over 40 million years of evolution.

The Muller F element (4.2 Mb, ~80 protein-coding genes) is an unusual autosome of Drosophila melanogaster; it is mostly heterochromatic with a low recombination rate. To investigate how these properties impact the evolution of repeats and genes, we manually improved the sequence and annotated the genes on the D.

Interaction of Cryptococcus neoformans Rim101 and protein kinase A regulates capsule.

Cryptococcus neoformans is a prevalent human fungal pathogen that must survive within various tissues in order to establish a human infection. We have identified the C. neoformans Rim101 transcription factor, a highly conserved pH-response regulator in many fungal species.