Organisms Commons^™

Anti-Tb And Antibacterial Activities Of Natural Products Extracts, Douglas Armstrong, Nathan Krause, Drew Frey

Faculty Scholarship – Chemistry

Samples of numerous plant species were received from the southwestern part of the USA from Richard Spjut, and plant samples were collected here in Illinois. All were extracted with typical solvents, giving crude residues, some of which were subjected to counter-current or flash chromatographic methods. Some of the crude extracts and chromatographic fractions had anti-tuberculosis and/or antibacterial activity.

In a general way, bioactive natural products are dealt with very well by Liang & Fang, 2006. More specifically, the southwestern part of the United States has a large variety of indigenous plants, many of which have not been investigated for their …

Engineering Of A Light-Gated Potassium Channel, Christian Cosentino, Laura Alberio, Sabrina Gazzarrini, Marco Aquila, Eduardo Romano, Solei Cermenati, Paolo Zuccolini, Jan Petersen, Monica Beltrame, James L. Van Etten, John M. Christie, Gerhard Thiel, Anna Moroni

James Van Etten Publications

The present palette of opsin-based optogenetic tools lacks a light-gated potassium (K+) channel desirable for silencing of excitable cells. Here, we describe the construction of a blue-light–induced K+ channel 1 (BLINK1) engineered by fusing the plant LOV2-Ja photosensory module to the small viral K+ channel Kcv. BLINK1 exhibits biophysical features of Kcv, including K+ selectivity and high single-channel conductance, but reversibly photoactivates in blue light. Opening of BLINK1 channels hyperpolarizes the cell to the K+ equilibrium potential. Ectopic expression of BLINK1 reversibly inhibits the escape response in light-exposed zebrafish larvae. BLINK1 therefore provides a single-component optogenetic tool that can establish …

Integrated Pest Management (Ipm) For Vertebrates: Do We Need To Broaden This Concept?, John Hadidian

John Hadidian, PhD

The concepts and practices of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) are historically grounded in programs aimed at insects and disease-causing organisms affecting agriculture. When applied to vertebrates, IPM concepts have most often been used in rodent control programs. Still, IPM is a powerful model that arguably can, and should, apply to conflicts with any “pest” or problem-causing organism. It may be time to examine contemporary IPM approaches and their relation to traditional vertebrate pest control more closely. Vertebrate IPM should encompass not only the development of sound and practical steps to shape decision-making and actions, but a dialogue about ethics as …

Reply To Kjartansdóttir Et Al.: Chlorovirus Atcv-1 Findings Not Explained By Contamination, Robert H. Yolken, Lorraine Jones-Brando, David Dunigan, Geetha Kannan, Faith Dickerson, Emily Severance, Sarven Sabunciyan, C. Conover Talbot Jr., Emese Prandovszky, James Gurnon, Irina Agarkova, Flora Leister, Kristin L. Gressitt, Ou Chen, Bryan Deuber, Fangrui Ma, Mikhail V. Pletnikov, James L. Van Etten

James Van Etten Publications

We agree with Kjartansdóttir et al. (1) that extreme caution must be used when interpreting high-throughput sequencing results in new hosts. The situation demands thorough investigation and validation beyond the identification of a few sequencing reads. However, we believe it is unlikely that random laboratory contamination explains the results reported in Yolken et al. (2) for the following reasons. ...

Therefore, the conclusions in our report are based not only on “a few sequence reads” (1), but on confirmatory assays, as well as a highly controlled animal model of oral exposure and subsequent measurement of immune response and behavior. We …

Large Dsdna Chloroviruses Encode Diverse Membrane Transport Proteins, Gerhard Thiel, Timo Greiner, David Dunigan, Anna Moroni

James Van Etten Publications

Many large DNA viruses that infect certain isolates of chlorella-like green algae (chloroviruses) are unusual because they often encode a diverse set of membrane transport proteins, including functional K+ channels and aquaglyceroporins as well as K+ transporters and calcium transporting ATPases. Some chloroviruses also encode putative ligand-gated-like channel proteins. No one protein is present in all of the chloroviruses that have been sequenced, but the K+ channel is the most common as only two chloroviruses have been isolated that lack this complete protein. This review describes the properties of these membrane-transporting proteins and suggests possible physiological functions and evolutionary histories …