Preliminary Evidence for Training-Induced Changes of Morphology and Phantom Limb Pain.

The aim of this study was to investigate whether a special prosthetic training in phantom limb pain patients aimed at increasing the functional use of the prosthesis leads to neural morphological plasticity of brain structures and a reduction in phantom limb pain. For chronic pain disorders, it was shown that morphological alterations due to pain might become at least partially reversed by pain therapies. Phantom limb pain is a chronic pain disorder that is frequently followed by neural plasticity of anatomical brain structures.

The Fungal Pathogen Does Not Depend on Surface Ferric Reductases for Iron Acquisition.

Iron acquisition is a crucial virulence determinant for many bacteria and fungi, including the opportunistic fungal pathogens and While the diverse strategies used by for obtaining iron from the host are well-described, much less is known about the acquisition of this micronutrient from host sources by - a distant relative of with closer evolutionary ties to , which nonetheless causes severe clinical symptoms in humans. Here we show that is much more restricted than in using host iron sources, lacking, for example, the ability to grow on transferrin and hemin/hemoglobin. Instead, is able to use ferritin and non-protein-bound iron (FeCl) as iron sources in a pH-dependent manner.

Direct Binding of the pH-Regulated Protein 1 (Pra1) from Inhibits Cytokine Secretion by Mouse CD4 T Cells.

Opportunistic infections with the saprophytic yeast are a major cause of morbidity in immunocompromised patients. While the interaction of cells and molecules of innate immunity with has been studied to great depth, comparatively little is known about the modulation of adaptive immunity by . In particular, direct interaction of proteins secreted by with CD4 T cells has not been studied in detail.

Specific and Novel microRNAs Are Regulated as Response to Fungal Infection in Human Dendritic Cells.

Within the last two decades, the incidence of invasive fungal infections has been significantly increased. They are characterized by high mortality rates and are often caused by and . The increasing number of infections underlines the necessity for additional anti-fungal therapies, which require extended knowledge of gene regulations during fungal infection.

Dermatomal Organization of SI Leg Representation in Humans: Revising the Somatosensory Homunculus.

Penfield and Rasmussen's homunculus is the valid map of the neural body representation of nearly each textbook of biology, physiology, and neuroscience. The somatosensory homunculus places the foot representation on the mesial surface of the postcentral gyrus followed by the representations of the lower leg and the thigh in superio-lateral direction. However, this strong homuncular organization contradicts the "dermatomal" organization of spinal nerves.

Widespread Inter- and Intra-Domain Horizontal Gene Transfer of d-Amino Acid Metabolism Enzymes in Eukaryotes.

Analysis of the growing number of available fully-sequenced genomes has shown that Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) in eukaryotes is more common than previously thought. It has been proposed that genes with certain functions may be more prone to HGT than others, but we still have a very poor understanding of the selective forces driving eukaryotic HGT. Recent work uncovered that d-amino acid racemases have been commonly transferred from bacteria to fungi, but their role in the receiving organisms is currently unknown.