A Short Report allows authors to publish the results of a small number of experiments, provided the conclusion is clear and justified, and the findings are novel and judged to be of high importance.
An in silico analysis of gap junction proteins supports the hypothesis that connexins replaced the primordial innexins in chordate gap junctions due to an evolutionary bottleneck.
Optimising the use of transcriptomics enables screening of thousands of compounds and illustrates an approach that yields quantitative pharmacology at the single-gene and pathway level.
Increased catalysis has been suggested to be an adaptive trait of enzymes to growth at lower temperature, but systematic analysis suggests that temperature exerts a weak selection pressure on enzyme rate enhancement, with observed variation arising from other evolutionary forces.
Aging is associated with mitochondrial and cytosolic iron accumulation in the brain, which is through increased local expression of hepcidin, and subsequent iron accumulation due to decreased iron export through ferroportin-1.
Ruby-throated hummingbirds switch from using torpor to survive nighttime energy emergencies in the breeding season to using it to spare fat stores and gain premigratory mass in the late summer.
As well as preventing bone loss, bisphosphonate drugs may boost early immune responses in the lung by acting directly on alveolar macrophages that form one of the first lines of defence against infection.
Intrathecal injection of CSF1 induces greater upregulation of spinal microglial genes in male versus female mice, however, Treg depletion enhances microglial activation and restores pain hypersensitivity in the female mice.
