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Introduction
Human malaria is caused by four species of the parasitic protozoan genus Plasmodium. Of these four species, Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for the vast majority of the 300–500 million episodes of malaria worldwide and accounts for 0.7–2.7 million annual deaths. In many endemic countries, malaria is r... | 12929205 | PMC176545 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 18; 1(1):e5 |
Introduction
Elephants have a very limited distribution in Borneo, being restricted to approximately 5% of the island in the extreme northeast (Figure 1). There are no historical records of elephants outside of this range. Fossil evidence for the prehistoric presence of elephants on Borneo is limited to a single specim... | 12929206 | PMC176546 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 18; 1(1):e6 |
A new study settles a long-standing dispute about the genesis of an endangered species. With scant fossil evidence supporting a prehistoric presence, scientists could not say for sure where Borneo's elephants came from. Did they descend from ancient prototypes of the Pleistocene era or from modern relatives introduced ... | 0 | PMC176547 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 18; 1(1):e7 |
Every year, malaria kills as many as 2.5 million people. Of these deaths, 90% occur in sub-Saharan Africa, and most are children. While four species of the single-celled organism Plasmodium cause malaria, Plasmodium falciparum is the deadliest. Harbored in mosquito saliva, the parasite infects its human host as the mos... | 0 | PMC176548 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 18; 1(1):e11 |
Introduction
Circadian rhythms of diverse organisms are based on similar intracellular molecular feedback loops (Dunlap 1999; Allada et al. 2001; Panda et al. 2002). Based on this view, it is believed that one or a small number of clock cells are sufficient for self-sustained rhythms (Dunlap 1999). This is despite the ... | 12975658 | PMC193604 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 15; 1(1):e13 |
Introduction
The availability of complete sequences of genomes for clusters of related organisms presents the first opportunity to reconstruct events of genomic evolution. By comparing related genomes and inferring ancestral ones, we can identify events, such as specific chromosomal rearrangements, gene acquisitions, d... | 12975657 | PMC193605 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 15; 1(1):e19 |
How do people subjected to the endless dark days of winter in the far northern latitudes maintain normal daily rhythms? Though many might feel like hibernating, a highly regulated internal system keeps such impractical yearnings in check. From fruit flies to humans, nearly every living organism depends on an internal c... | 0 | PMC193606 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 15; 1(1):e23 |
Bacteria are an indiscriminate lot. While most organisms tend to pass their genes on to the next generation of their species, bacteria often exchange genetic material with totally unrelated species. That is why skeptics doubted that bacteria researchers could ever hope to map a reliable history of cell lineages in bact... | 0 | PMC193607 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 15; 1(1):e31 |
pmcBackground
Small GTPases of the ADP-ribosylation factor (ARF) family play a major role in membrane trafficking in eukaryotic cells [1]. ARF activation is facilitated by specific guanine nucleotide exchange factors (ARF-GEFs). Several ARF-GEFs have been identified, varying in size, structure and subcellular distribu... | 12969509 | PMC212319 | CC BY | 2022-01-04 23:15:02 | no | BMC Cell Biol. 2003 Sep 11; 4:13 |
Introduction
During B- and T-lymphocyte development, the immunoglobulin (Ig) and T-cell receptor (TCR) genes are assembled from discrete V, D, and J gene elements via a process of genomic rearrangements known as V(D)J recombination (Fugmann et al. 2000a; Hesslein and Schatz 2001). V(D)J recombination occurs in two step... | 14551903 | PMC212687 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e1 |
Based on sheer numbers, microbes should rule the world. Most don't cause disease, but those that do have the advantage of multiplying and mutating at a much faster rate than any multicellular organism can. So how does a slowly reproducing, trillion-celled organism like a human protect itself? By having the right weapon... | 0 | PMC212688 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e4 |
Corn is one of humankind's earliest innovations. It was domesticated 10,000 years ago when humans learned to cross-pollinate plants and slowly turned a scraggly nondescript grass called teosinte into plump, productive modern corn (Figure 1). As needs change, so does plant breeding. Today, while biotech super-giants man... | 14551906 | PMC212689 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e8 |
When did calling a lawyer become part of the scientific process? It hasn't officially, of course. But as a generation of researchers has grudgingly come to know, navigating the legal red tape of universities, corporations, and publishers is an inevitable part of the practice. Whether seeking access to information or sh... | 14551907 | PMC212690 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:25:30 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e9 |
Introduction
Considerable effort employing biochemistry, genetics, and pharmacology has been invested in identifying the web of interactions that characterize signal transduction pathways in metazoan organisms. Several conclusions can be drawn from these efforts. Despite the large number of receptors, ligands, and down... | 14551908 | PMC212691 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e10 |
Introduction
RNA interference (RNAi) is targeted gene silencing via double-stranded RNA (dsRNA); a gene is inactivated by specific breakdown of the mRNA (Fire et al. 1998; Montgomery et al. 1998). It is an ideal method for rapid identification of in vivo gene function. Initial studies on RNAi used microinjection to del... | 14551910 | PMC212692 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e12 |
In 1928 the German botanist Emil Heitz visualised in moss nuclei chromosomal regions that do not undergo postmitotic decondensation (Heitz 1928). He termed these parts of the chromosomes heterochromatin, whereas fractions of the chromosome that decondense and spread out diffusely in the interphase nucleus are referred ... | 14551911 | PMC212693 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e14 |
Microarrays are used to survey the expression of thousands of genes in a single experiment. Applied creatively, they can be used to test as well as generate new hypotheses. As the technology becomes more accessible, microarray analysis is finding applications in diverse areas of biology. Microarrays are simply a method... | 14551912 | PMC212694 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e15 |
The immune system needs to be able to identify and ultimately destroy foreign invaders. To do so, it utilizes two major types of immune cells, T cells and B cells (or, collectively, lymphocytes). Lymphocytes display a large variety of cell surface receptors that can recognize and respond to an unlimited number of patho... | 14551913 | PMC212695 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e16 |
The completion of the human genome project has ushered in a new era in which biology has become an information science. In this new era, sharing of information is quickly becoming a critical aspect of scientific discovery. As directors of National Institutes of Health (NIH) institutes dedicated to neuroscience, we reco... | 14551914 | PMC212696 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e17 |
Rich Lenski decided he was onto a good thing from his very first encounter with digital evolution. It all began when he used the technology in which artificial organisms in the form of computer code evolve independently by self-replicating, mutating, and competing to re-examine an earlier study with bacteria. The origi... | 14551915 | PMC212697 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e18 |
Introduction
Type 2 diabetes is a serious metabolic disease associated with an increased risk of premature death and substantial disability, largely mediated through its adverse effects on the vasculature. The prevalence of the disease is increasing, and the World Health Organisation estimates suggest that by 2025 ther... | 14551916 | PMC212698 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e20 |
Introduction
Endosymbiosis is common in insects, with more than 10% of insect species relying upon intracellular bacteria for their development and survival (Baumann et al. 2000). Full genome sequencing of the endosymbiotic bacteria, Buchnera aphidicola, of several species of aphids has revealed extensive gene loss (Sh... | 14551917 | PMC212699 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e21 |
When it comes to exploiting a niche, endosymbionts take the prize. In endosymbiosis, one organism—the endosymbiont—invades the cells of another, in some cases taking up residence in a way that actually benefits the host. Bacteria are particularly adept at making themselves indispensable by insinuating themselves into s... | 0 | PMC212700 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:25:30 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e24 |
The past ten years saw great progress in the field of molecular genetics, as new tools gave scientists the ability to investigate entire genomes instead of just one or two genes at a time. In this paper, Ronald Plasterk and colleagues developed a systemic approach using Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny nematode and the f... | 0 | PMC212701 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e26 |
Diversity of human appearance and form has intrigued biologists for centuries, but nearly 100 years after the term “genetics” was coined by William Bateson in 1906, the genes that underlie this diversity are an unsolved mystery. One of the most obvious phenotypes that distinguish members of our species, differences in ... | 14551921 | PMC212702 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e27 |
A leading cause of death and disability, diabetes affects some 16 million Americans and up to 135 million people worldwide. While environmental factors such as diet and lifestyle are known to influence an individual's risk of getting adult-onset, or Type 2, diabetes, there is also a substantial inherited component, tho... | 0 | PMC212703 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e30 |
From the moment its life begins, the fate of a multicellular organism depends on how well its cells communicate. Proteins act as molecular switchboard operators to keep the lines of communication open and the flow of cellular messages on track. But charting the protein interactions, signaling pathways, and other elemen... | 0 | PMC212704 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e32 |
Welcome to PLoS Biology. We would like to introduce you to your journal, one that is run by and for the scientific community in the broadest sense: researchers, teachers, students, physicians, and the public.
One could argue whether scientists need more journals, but we believe there is a global need for greater acces... | 14551925 | PMC212705 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e34 |
Communication among scientists has undergone a revolution in the last decade, with the movement of scientific publication to a digital medium and the emergence of the Internet as the primary means for distributing information. Millions of articles are, in principle, just a mouse click away from our computers. For many ... | 14551926 | PMC212706 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:25:30 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Oct 13; 1(1):e36 |
Introduction
Over the past two decades, technological advances in molecular biology have fuelled progress in the discovery of new pathogens associated with human diseases. The identification of novel viruses such as hepatitis C virus (Choo et al. 1989), sin nombre virus (Nichol et al. 1993), and Kaposi's sarcoma herpes... | 14624234 | PMC261870 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Nov 17; 1(2):e2 |
Iron is an essential nutrient for sustaining life-forms as diverse as plankton and humans. But too much iron, or too little, can spell trouble. Mammalian cells maintain the proper balance partly with the help of a specialized cell surface protein called the transferrin receptor (TfR). TfRs bind to the iron-carrying tra... | 0 | PMC300675 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:05 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Dec 22; 1(3):e29 |
One of the variants associated with increased diabetes risk was incorrectly indicated throughout this article. The A1369S variant in the gene ABCCB should have been written S1369A. The alanine variant is associated with increased risk. This mistake affects Tables 2 and 4, the text of the article in the section entitled... | 0 | PMC300700 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2003 Dec 22; 1(3):e92 |
Introduction
Many cellular proteins are degraded by the proteasome after they become covalently modified with a multiubiquitin chain. The 26S proteasome is a massive protein composed of a 20S core and two 19S regulatory particles (Voges et al. 1999). The 20S core can be subdivided into a dimer of heptameric rings of β ... | 14737182 | PMC300881 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:02 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 24; 2(1):e2 |
Introduction
Microarray experiments are now being used to address a large diversity of biological issues. The large datasets obtained by pooling those experiments together contain a wealth of biological information beyond the insights gained by individual measurements. For example, it was demonstrated that diverse data... | 14737187 | PMC300882 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 15; 2(1):e9 |
Introduction
Most, if not all, cells have the potential to carry out the apoptotic cell death program (Jacobson et al. 1997). Key players in this process are caspase family proteases. Apical caspases are activated through interactions with adapter molecules in response to death signals arising from cellular compartment... | 14737191 | PMC300883 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 15; 2(1):e15 |
Proteins may be the workhorse of the cell, but when a cell can synthesize one protein in a matter of minutes, chances are some will become obsolete. Though many proteins put in years of productive service, others quickly outlive their usefulness and can even damage the cell. Proteins that help form bone and muscle, for... | 0 | PMC300884 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 24; 2(1):e17 |
Bioinformatics and microarrays have given scientists powerful new tools to investigate the structure and activity of genes on a global scale. Rather than studying just a few genes, scientists can analyze tens of thousands within and across species. Microarrays flag which genes are expressed under particular cellular co... | 0 | PMC300885 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 15; 2(1):e18 |
You might say that caspases are obsessed with death. The primary agents of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, caspases kill cells by destroying proteins that sustain cellular processes. Apoptosis, a highly controlled sequence of events that eliminates dangerous or unnecessary cells, contributes to a wide variety of d... | 0 | PMC300886 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 15; 2(1):e34 |
Introduction
Since the classic observations of the many histologic similarities between the tumor microenvironment and normal wound healing, it has been proposed that tumor stroma is “normal wound healing gone awry” (Dvorak 1986). During normal wound healing, coagulation of extravasated blood initiates a complex cascad... | 14737219 | PMC314300 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 13; 2(2):e7 |
The idea that cancer cells go through a fateful transition that turns them into fast-growing, invasive, metastasizing tumors first surfaced in the early 1970s. During this conversion, blood vessels form around the tumor, providing a dedicated supply of blood to fuel the tumor's aggressive behavior. By the mid-1980s his... | 0 | PMC314301 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 13; 2(2):e39 |
Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, recently called attention to the clear inequalities in science between developing and developed countries and to the challenges of building bridges across these gaps that should bring the United Nations and the world scientific community closer to each other (Ann... | 14737181 | PMC314462 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e1 |
Introduction
A fundamental question in developmental biology is how adjacent regions of the vertebrate body acquire differences in their appearance or morphology. Mechanisms that establish the general body plan make use of a relatively small number of signaling pathways shared among all animals (reviewed in Pires-daSil... | 14737183 | PMC314463 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e3 |
Introduction
Malaria is one of the most devastating infectious diseases in the world, killing more than 1 million people per year. Malaria is transmitted by bites of infected mosquitoes that inject sporozoites under the skin. The first obligatory step for these parasites to establish infection in humans is migration to... | 14737184 | PMC314464 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e4 |
Introduction
Olfactory receptor (OR) genes provide the basis for the sense of smell (Buck and Axel 1991) and, with more than 1,000 genes, comprise the largest gene superfamily in mammalian genomes (Glusman et al. 2001; Zozulya et al. 2001; Young and Trask 2002; Zhang and Firestein 2002; Olender et al. 2003). OR genes a... | 14737185 | PMC314465 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e5 |
Introduction
Primate lentiviruses persist in the host by active replication and can reemerge from latent reservoirs that are established in cells of the immune system (Finzi and Siliciano 1998; Douek et al. 2003). The infectious cycle is intimately linked to interactions between circulating T cells and antigen-presenti... | 14737186 | PMC314466 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e6 |
JSTOR is successful for reasons its founders did not intend. Bill Bowen's inspired vision was of a solution to libraries' ever-voracious demands for space to house paper volumes. The idea was that libraries could save space by removing volumes available in electronic format. Few libraries have discarded the volumes dig... | 0 | PMC314467 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e10 |
Inside eukaryotic cells there is a massive protein complex called the proteasome whose raison d'être is to remove unnecessary proteins by breaking them down into short peptides. The proteasome is thus responsible for an important aspect of cellular regulation because the timely and controlled proteolysis of key cellula... | 14737189 | PMC314468 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e13 |
Introduction
Protein–protein interactions govern cell physiology, and the disruption of some sensitive connections in the network can have pathological effects. Once a genome has been sequenced, one of the goals of functional genomics is the elucidation of the protein interaction network supporting biochemical and gene... | 14737190 | PMC314469 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e14 |
Scientists have long known that variation in animal color patterns carry far more than cosmetic significance. Darwin first connected pigmentation with adaptive advantage, noting that male finches with bright red plumage enjoyed greater reproductive success than their drab competitors. Explaining why coloration confers ... | 0 | PMC314470 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e16 |
Individuals within a wild population show remarkably little morphological variation, given the amount of environmental variation they encounter during development and the amount of genetic variation within the population. This phenotypic constancy led to the proposal that individuals were somehow buffered, or canalized... | 14737195 | PMC314471 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e19 |
Introduction
Repair of double-strand breaks (DSBs) by homologous recombination involves the search for homology to locate an intact donor sequence. The search is successful when the broken DNA molecule basepairs with the homologous template, termed synapsis, and forms strand invasion intermediates of recombination. In ... | 14737196 | PMC314472 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:03 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e21 |
One of the cornerstones of immune system function is movement. When word spreads that a virus has entered the body, chemical signals tell lymphocytes to proliferate and travel to the site of infection. Efforts to combat HIV have focused on understanding how the virus disrupts this immune response in the hopes of develo... | 0 | PMC314473 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e23 |
Introduction
Sleep is important for the consolidation of newly acquired memories (Jenkins and Dallenbach 1924; Fishbein 1971; Pearlman and Becker 1974; Smith and Butler 1982; Smith and Kelly 1988; Karni et al. 1994; Stickgold et al. 2000; Laureys et al. 2002; Fenn et al. 2003). The discovery of experience-dependent neu... | 14737198 | PMC314474 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e24 |
In the first month after our launch, the PDF of the “monkey-robot” article by Miguel Nicolelis received tens of thousands of downloads. We are not sure who downloaded the paper because we do not ask people to register at our site. We suspect, however, that its popularity is in part due to the widespread media coverage ... | 14737199 | PMC314475 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e25 |
As cells can only arise from cells that already exist, continuity of life depends on the highly regulated sequence of events that control cell division. This process is mediated by a complex macromolecular structure called the mitotic spindle. The most conspicuous components of the spindle are microtubules, which are m... | 0 | PMC314476 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e26 |
RNA interference (RNAi) has been called “one of the most has exciting discoveries in biology in the last couple decades,” and since it was first recognized by Andrew Fire et al. in 1998, it has quickly become one of the most powerful and indispensable tools in the molecular biologist's toolkit. Using short double-stran... | 14737201 | PMC314477 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e28 |
Plasmodium, the microscopic parasite that causes malaria, passes through two hosts, two reproductive modes, four habitats, and over half-a-dozen distinct developmental stages in one lifecycle. When a Plasmodium-infected mosquito bites a human, it injects the parasite—sequestered in the mosquito's salivary glands in its... | 0 | PMC314478 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:04 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e32 |
Conventional wisdom says that people deficient in one sense—such as vision or hearing—often acquire heightened acuity in another. And some studies support this notion by showing that areas of the brain known to control vision can respond to other forms of sensory stimuli in persons without sight. These adjustments, of ... | 0 | PMC314479 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:27:51 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e33 |
How does your brain pass the time while you're sleeping? If you've ever wrestled the demons of insomnia, you know what sleepless nights can do to your mental agility. Sleep cycles in mammals are characterized by two distinct, successive sleep stages: slow wave and rapid eye movement (REM). Both stages of sleep have uni... | 0 | PMC314480 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:05 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e37 |
Genes use a simple language—written in the molecules of DNA—to build thousands of proteins in a dizzying variety of sizes and shapes. With only four different nucleotide building blocks, DNA codes for the 20 different amino acids (each with their own structures and properties) that provide the foundation for the enormo... | 0 | PMC314481 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:05 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e38 |
One of the central problems for much of the 20th century was how to reconcile genetic stability with evolutionary change. Genomic fidelity was thought to arise from an inherent invariability in the DNA structure itself. Biologists now know that DNA constantly undergoes modifications as it unwinds, replicates, condenses... | 0 | PMC314482 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:05 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e74 |
Developing countries today face a wide range of needs, from more secure food supplies to cheap and effective medicines. One factor that almost all these needs have in common is that satisfying them adequately will not occur without the use of modern science. These same countries also face a range of political dilemmas—... | 14737188 | PMC314483 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:05 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e11 |
Introduction
Two different pathways of spindle assembly are known to operate in the animal kingdom. The first, observed in somatic as well as in male germline cells, requires the microtubule organising activity of centrosomes (Compton 2000; Bornens 2002). The second, restricted to female germline and some embryonic cel... | 14758368 | PMC317275 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:05 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e8 |
The pathologist makes do with red wine until an effective drug is available, the biochemist discards the bread from her sandwiches, and the mathematician indulges in designer chocolate with a clear conscience. The demographer sticks to vitamin supplements, and while the evolutionary biologist calculates the compensatio... | 14758367 | PMC322746 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:28:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Jan 20; 2(1):e12 |
Introduction
The Wnt signal transduction pathway has been studied extensively in both vertebrate and invertebrate systems. The Drosophila ortholog wingless (wg) is a segment polarity gene that defines posterior cell fates in each of the larval segments (for a review of the various functions of Wg, see Wodarz and Nusse ... | 15024404 | PMC338072 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Apr 10; 2(4):e95 |
A couple of years ago, a paper was published in a high-profile journal that challenged a long-established model of cell signaling. While researchers in the field mostly greeted the results with skepticism, some went into the lab to investigate the discrepancy. Many elements of this pathway, called the Wnt pathway, have... | 0 | PMC340127 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Apr 10; 2(4):e102 |
Introduction
During primary human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1) infection, the immune system appears to respond appropriately in order to prevent viral spread, with the mounting of a strong HIV-specific CD8+ T-cell response and a corresponding reduction in viraemia (Koup et al. 1994). In common with the majority of ... | 14966528 | PMC340937 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e20 |
Introduction
Aberrant retinoblastoma 1 (pRb) pathway activity, resulting from defects in pRb itself, cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 2A (p16INK4a), cyclin D1 (CCND1), or cyclin-dependent kinase 4 (CDK4), is observed in the majority of human sporadic cancers (Marshall 1991; Weinberg 1995; Sherr 1996; Ortega et al. 200... | 14966529 | PMC340938 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:06 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e22 |
Nobody questions the importance of good scientific information for sound environmental decision-making. But designing mechanisms to link scientific research to the decision-making process is no easy matter. Research and decision-making often seem to operate in different worlds. Policy-makers' needs for applied findings... | 14966530 | PMC340939 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e27 |
Introduction
Because of the abundant availability of mouse and human genome data (International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium 2001; Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium 2002), it has come to light that mutation rates vary widely across different regions of the human genome (Matassi et al. 1999; Mouse Genome Sequenci... | 14966531 | PMC340940 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e29 |
Introduction
The analysis of whole-genome sequences has revealed that most signaling systems consist of multiple ligands that converge on a relatively small set of receptors and pathway-specific transcription factors. In the case of human transforming growth factor-β (TGFβ) signaling, 42 TGFβs converge on seven type I ... | 14966532 | PMC340941 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e30 |
Introduction
Polyketides are a large class of structurally and pharmacologically diverse molecules, including many antibiotics and antitumor drugs (O'Hagan 1991). They are produced as secondary metabolites primarily by bacteria and fungi (Hopwood 1997). Analogous to fatty acid synthases (FASs), polyketide synthases (PK... | 14966533 | PMC340942 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e31 |
For half a century, natural products from microorganisms have been the main source of medicines for treating infectious disease. The most important chemical class of these antibiotics, apart from the penicillins, is the polyketides. They are made by the stepwise building of long carbon chains, two atoms at a time, by m... | 14966534 | PMC340943 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e35 |
Introduction
Most patients who succumb to cancer do so not from primary tumor burden, but from metastatic disease (Fidler 2003). For example, advanced-stage peritoneal carcinomatosis (e.g., from metastatic ovarian and breast cancer) and disseminated peritoneal lymphomas are often resistant to current chemotherapy treat... | 14966535 | PMC340944 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e36 |
For people who received their introduction to cancer genetics in college in the first half of the 1990s, everything looked simple and straightforward. It was the stuff you could explain to sincerely interested relatives who wanted to know what you were spending your time on. There were oncogenes and there were tumour s... | 14966536 | PMC340945 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e40 |
Of the 300 or so viruses that cause disease in humans, HIV may have the greatest adaptive advantage. Like most persistent viruses—including the herpesviruses Epstein–Barr and cytomegalovirus (CMV)—HIV employs various strategies to counteract its host's response to infection. But HIV possesses a unique ability to sustai... | 0 | PMC340946 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e41 |
Introduction
It is well established that learning can have a strong impact on neural responses to visual stimuli in high-level association cortices such as inferior temporal (IT) or prefrontal (PF) cortex, where the activity of single neurons reflects learning in pair association, object identification, or categorizati... | 14966538 | PMC340947 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e44 |
Introduction
Practice can induce behavioral improvement that is often specific to the situation experienced during the practice sessions (or “training”). Such findings suggest that changes occur in neurons with fine selectivity (or “tuning”) for the stimuli experienced or the movements made during training. In the visu... | 14966539 | PMC340948 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e45 |
Stuttering, with its characteristic disruption in verbal fluency, has been known for centuries; earliest descriptions probably date back to the Biblical Moses' “slowness of speech and tongue” and his related avoidance behavior (Exodus 4, 10–13). Stuttering occurs in all cultures and ethnic groups (Andrews et al. 1983; ... | 14966540 | PMC340949 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e46 |
Creative human beings are the torch-bearers of civilization. How does their creativity arise? What causes some minds/brains to achieve awe-inspiring artistic or scientific achievements? We cannot help but be fascinated by the fact that Shakespeare—a merchant's son with “small Latin and less Greek”—could emerge from the... | 0 | PMC340950 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e47 |
“I look forward to such an organization of the literary records of medicine that a puzzled worker in any part of the civilized world shall in an hour be able to gain the knowledge pertaining to a subject of the experience of every other man in the world.”
—George Gould, first president of the Association of Medical L... | 14966541 | PMC340951 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e48 |
Introduction
Chemotaxis is the process by which motile bacteria sense changes in their chemical environment and move to more favorable conditions (Bren and Eisenbach 2000). In peritrichously flagellated bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis, swimming alternates between smooth runs and reorientating tu... | 14966542 | PMC340952 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:26:25 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e49 |
The growing library of sequenced genomes is challenging scientists to extract new biological meaning from DNA sequences. Comparative analysis of the mouse and human genome, for example, has already revealed that mutation rates in the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome vary considerably. What accounts for this reg... | 0 | PMC340953 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:26:25 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e51 |
The AIDS crisis has brought to public notice what has always been generally true—that the existing business model for drug development leads to high prices and unequal access. There is now widespread dissatisfaction with drug prices in both the developed (Families USA 2003) and developing world (Correa 2000). Governmen... | 14966544 | PMC340954 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e52 |
By next summer, more than 40% of Streptococcus pneumoniae strains in the United States will resist both penicillin and erythromycin, according to a recent prediction from the Harvard School of Public Health. The forecast, based on mathematical modeling, was published in the spring of 2003. It's too early to tell whethe... | 14966545 | PMC340955 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e53 |
From Bob Clark's snug office in Boise, Idaho, where he manages the United States government's Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP), he figures his computer provides fingertip reach to just about everybody who's anybody in wildfire research. This points to a primary need of nations worldwide in combating the scourge of rec... | 14966546 | PMC340956 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e54 |
Faced with new and ongoing threats to public health, researchers are becoming increasingly resourceful in their quest to discover new drugs. Drug researchers have long looked to living organisms for inspiration, either mimicking or extracting chemical formulas from naturally occurring compounds. Bacteria and fungi, for... | 0 | PMC340957 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:26:25 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e56 |
Late-stage cancers are notoriously unresponsive to treatment, making certain hard-to-detect cancers particularly insidious. Ovarian cancer, for example, most often escapes diagnosis until the tumor has already metastasized. At this stage, ovarian cancer is classified as peritoneal carcinomatosis, a terminal condition c... | 0 | PMC340958 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e58 |
Thanks to the tools of molecular biology, our understanding of the 100-plus diseases known collectively as cancer has increased dramatically over the past decades. While each of these cancers exhibits unique characteristics reflecting the particular cell or tissue it springs from, the disease follows a similar arc in n... | 0 | PMC340959 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:26:25 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e59 |
If you've ever hit a patch of ice on the road that sent your car swerving left while you resolutely—and futilely—steered right to get back in your lane, you've experienced what neuroscientists call a “visuomotor rotation task.” On a dry road, your response would have been appropriate. But under icy conditions, the same... | 0 | PMC340960 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e60 |
Most animals (including humans) show a high level of bilateral symmetry: on the surface, the right side of our body resembles the left. A closer and deeper look, however, reveals an underlying asymmetry. The heart, for example, is on the left side in most humans, and the liver on the right. This left-right asymmetry de... | 0 | PMC340961 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e61 |
The primate brain processes a remarkably diverse array of visual cues to recognize objects in dynamic settings crammed with unfamiliar objects. Not surprisingly, repeated viewing aids recognition, but how the brain orchestrates this experience-driven improvement is unclear. Visual input to the brain travels from the ey... | 0 | PMC340962 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e62 |
Open access is gaining momentum. Authors are submitting papers in ever-increasing numbers to open-access journals. Several prominent research sponsors, including the Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Society, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche ... | 14966553 | PMC340963 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:26:25 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e63 |
When we think of foraging for food, we usually imagine animals wandering in the woods, poking behind bushes and trees, trying to find something tasty. Amazingly, even single-cell bacteria display a simplified version of this behavior. Many species of bacteria can respond to chemical or nutritional cues (chemoattractant... | 0 | PMC340964 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:26:25 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Feb 17; 2(2):e66 |
Introduction
The endoribonuclease Dicer produces two types of small regulatory RNAs that regulate gene expression: small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs) (Bernstein et al. 2001; Grishok et al. 2001; Hutvágner et al. 2001; Ketting et al. 2001; Knight and Bass 2001). In animals, siRNAs direct target mRNA ... | 15024405 | PMC350664 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Apr 24; 2(4):e98 |
Introduction
Eukaryotic small RNAs of approximately 21–24 nucleotides function as guide molecules in a remarkably wide range of biological processes, including developmental timing and patterning, formation of heterochromatin, genome rearrangement, and antiviral defense (Carrington and Ambros 2003; Finnegan and Matzke ... | 15024409 | PMC350667 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 May 24; 2(5):e104 |
Since small RNA molecules were discovered just over ten years ago, it's become clear that these once overlooked bits of genetic material play a decidedly large role in controlling gene expression. Though typically just 21 to 24 nucleotides long, small RNAs regulate a diverse array of cellular processes, from developmen... | 0 | PMC350672 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:07 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 May 24; 2(5):e107 |
Regulation of gene expression—deciding how much of what proteins are produced in the cell—is controlled by a myriad of different molecules. One type of naturally occurring regulatory molecule is small interfering RNA (siRNA), which selectively disrupts the production of a protein it is programmed to recognize, a proces... | 0 | PMC350674 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Apr 24; 2(4):e114 |
We are two of the scientist members of the President's Council on Bioethics. In late 2001, we were invited by the President of the United States to serve on this Council. The Bioethics Council was appointed by the President to “monitor stem-cell research, to recommend appropriate guidelines and regulations, and to cons... | 15024408 | PMC359389 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Apr 5; 2(4):e116 |
During the last few years, we have seen enormous strides in our abilities to sequence genomes, and the information that has poured out of these sequences is quite astonishing. With more than 150 complete genome sequences now available and many laboratories rushing into microarray analysis, proteomic initiatives, and ev... | 15024411 | PMC368155 | CC BY | 2021-01-05 08:21:08 | no | PLoS Biol. 2004 Mar 16; 2(3):e42 |
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