Ronald Atlas, former President for the American Society for Microbiology, discusses the new One Health Initiative that recognizes the inter-relationships among human, animal, and environmental health and seeks to enhance communication, cooperation, and collaboration in integrating these areas for the health and well-being of all species. Development of the One Health Initiative began in 2007 with the American Veterinary Medical Association's (AVMA) efforts to strengthen communications and...

The aging nervous system is known to manifest a variety of degenerative and regressive events. Here we report the unexpected growth of dendrites in the retinas of normal old mice. The dendrites of many rod bipolar cells in aging mice were observed to extend well beyond their normal strata within the outer plexiform layer to innervate the outer nuclear layer where they appeared to form contacts with the spherules of rod photoreceptors. Such dendritic sprouting increased with age and was...

Background The glucocorticoid receptor (GR) and mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) evolved from a common ancestor. Still not completely understood is how specificity for glucocorticoids (e.g. cortisol) and mineralocorticoids (e.g. aldosterone) evolved in these receptors. Results Our analysis of several vertebrate GRs and MRs in the context of 3D structures of human GR and MR indicates that with the exception of skate GR, a cartilaginous fish, there is a...

Because of the rise in atmospheric oxygen 2.3 billion years ago (Gya) and the subsequent changes in oceanic redox state over the last 2.3–1 Gya, trace metal bioavailability in marine environments has changed dramatically. Although theorized to have influenced the biological usage of metals leaving discernable genomic signals, a thorough and quantitative test of this hypothesis has been lacking. Using structural bioinformatics and whole-genome sequences, the Fe-, Zn-, Mn-, and...

The Wiggle series are support vector machine–based predictors that identify regions of functional flexibility using only protein sequence information. Functionally flexible regions are defined as regions that can adopt different conformational states and are assumed to be necessary for bioactivity. Many advances have been made in understanding the relationship between protein sequence and structure. This work contributes to those efforts by making strides to understand the relationship...

A simple classification scheme that uses only the presence or absence of a protein domain architecture has been used to determine the phylogeny of 174 complete genomes. The method correctly divides the 174 taxa into Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya and satisfactorily sorts most of the major groups within these superkingdoms. The most challenging problem involved 119 Bacteria, many of which have reduced genomes. When a weighting factor was used that takes account of difference in genome size...

The protein kinase family is large and important, but it is only one family in a larger superfamily of homologous kinases that phosphorylate a variety of substrates and play important roles in all three superkingdoms of life. We used a carefully constructed structural alignment of selected kinases as the basis for a study of the structural evolution of the protein kinase–like superfamily. The comparison of structures revealed a “universal core” domain consisting only of...