Excessive bone loss due to aging is a complication of senile osteoporosis, a severe skeletal disorder causing bones to become weaker and more susceptible to fractures over time. Current therapeutics to treat osteoporosis such as bisphosphonates, hormone replacements and nitric oxide donors proved ineffective as these drugs provoke serious health co...
In 2014 North American River Otters expanded up the North Fork of the Merced River into previously and historically unoccupied Yosemite Valley. Their range expansion posed the questions: 1) What are river otters preying upon in Yosemite Valley? 2) Could invasive Signal Crayfish provide a prey subsidy that promotes the upward elevational expansion o...
Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge (SPNWR), located in St. Croix U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), is a known hotspot for nesting sea turtles; however, a full analysis of green turtle (Chelonia mydas) nesting trends has not been conducted until this study. Green turtle nesting activities have been documented since the start of the sea turtle monitoring...
The adaptive immune system provides protection against disease and maintains memory of past exposures. Randomly rearranged antigen receptors can recognize virtually any pathogen. T cells recognize processed peptides that originate from protein fragments and are presented on major histocompatibility complex molecules. Human T cell receptor (TCR) fun...
Congenital heart disease (CHD) is a leading cause of infant mortality in the US and is commonly thought to arise from perturbations of transcription factors (TFs) that guide lineage choices during cardiac development. ISLET1 (ISL1) is one such TF, although it also directs differentiation of other cell types, including motor neuron progenitors (MNPs...
Embryos develop in dynamic environments and are subject to myriad stressors – both biotic and abiotic. Among those stressors are encounters with pathogens and toxic molecules. The systems for sensing and responding to the environment include a robust suite of molecular machinery that protects the cell, and a heterogeneous population of immune cells...
Human milk is an important biofluid for nutrition and regulatory signaling transmitted from mother to infant and is also known to be rich in microRNA (miRNA), a small noncoding RNA that can prevent translation or promote mRNA degradation. miRNA can be found inside extracellular vesicles (EVs), that likely protect them from digestion and RNase degra...
L'article poursuit un double objectif. D'une part, il propose une revue de l'articulation des concepts de genre et de sexe au prisme de la biologie de l'évolution dans le champ des études féministes francophones (cette délimitation tenant à la fois à des raisons de place, de pertinence scientifique et d'accessibilité au public non spécialiste). A c...
Published in Frontiers for Young Minds
Humans love to eat fish, but we must be careful not to catch too many. To make the right rules about how many fish can be caught without decreasing the population too much, it is helpful to know how many fish are in the sea. It is difficult for scientists to go underwater to count fish, but technology can help. Animals like dolphins can use sound t...
Published in STAR protocols
Tracking individual cell movement during development is challenging, particularly in tissues subjected to major remodeling. Currently, most live imaging techniques in Xenopus are limited to tissue explants and/or to superficial cells. We describe here a protocol to track immature multiciliated cells (MCCs) moving within the inner epidermal layer of...
