Gene transcription in Daphnia magna: effects of acute exposure to a carbamate insecticide and an acetanilide herbicide.

Daphnia magna is a key invertebrate in the freshwater environment and is used widely as a model in ecotoxicological measurements and risk assessment. Understanding the genomic responses of D. magna to chemical challenges will be of value to regulatory authorities worldwide.

Severe keratin 5 and 14 mutations induce down-regulation of junction proteins in keratinocytes.

The intermediate filament cytoskeleton is essential for the development and maintenance of normal tissue function. A number of diverse recent observations implicate these filament systems in sensing stress and protecting cells against its worst consequences. Cells expressing severely disruptive keratin mutations, characteristic of Dowling-Meara EBS, were previously reported to show elevated responses to physiological stress, and partial disassembly of cell junctions was reported upon direct mechanical stress to the cells.

Dual-specificity phosphatases in the hypo-osmotic stress response of keratin-defective epithelial cell lines.

Although mutations in intermediate filament proteins cause many human disorders, the detailed pathogenic mechanisms and the way these mutations affect cell metabolism are unclear. In this study, selected keratin mutations were analysed for their effect on the epidermal stress response. Expression profiles of two keratin-mutant cell lines from epidermolysis bullosa simplex patients (one severe and one mild) were compared to a control keratinocyte line before and after challenge with hypo-osmotic shock, a common physiological stress that transiently distorts cell shape.

Transcriptional profiling of the LPS induced NF-kappaB response in macrophages.

Background: Exposure of macrophages to bacterial products such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS) results in activation of the NF-kappaB transcription factor, which orchestrates a gene expression programme that underpins the macrophage-dependent immune response. These changes include the induction or repression of a wide range of genes that regulate inflammation, cell proliferation, migration and cell survival. This process is tightly regulated and loss of control is associated with conditions such as septic shock, inflammatory diseases and cancer.

A microarray-based high throughput molecular marker genotyping method: the tagged microarray marker (TAM) approach.

A microarray-based method has been developed for scoring thousands of DNAs for a co-dominant molecular marker on a glass slide. The approach was developed to detect insertional polymorphism of transposons and works well with single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. Biotin- terminated allele-specific PCR products are spotted unpurified onto streptavidin-coated glass slides and visualised by hybridisation of fluorescent detector oligonucleotides to tags attached to the allele- specific PCR primers.

A comparative genomic analysis of two distant diptera, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and the malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae.

Genome evolution entails changes in the DNA sequence of genes and intergenic regions, changes in gene numbers, and also changes in gene order along the chromosomes. Genes are reshuffled by chromosomal rearrangements such as deletions/insertions, inversions, translocations, and transpositions. Here we report a comparative study of genome organization in the main African malaria vector, Anopheles gambiae, relative to the recently determined sequence of the Drosophila melanogaster genome.