Unusual growth pattern in the Frasnian alveolitids (Tabulata) from the Holy Cross Mountains (Poland)

Abstract: Growth periodicity is a phenomenon occurring in fossil and modern corals. The most apparent feature is growth banding, and environmental changes are broadly accepted as controls on this phenomenon. If environment controls the growth, then all corallites within a colony should repeat the same growth pattern, as individuals are clones and must have shared the same environment. A study on several species of Alveolitidae (Anthozoa, Tabulata) from the Late Devonian (Early Frasnian) of the Holy Cross Mountains (Poland) shows that the growth pattern varies between neighbouring individuals within the same corallum. This contradicts observations of closely related Favositida as demonstrated on Pachyfavosites sp. from the Givetian of Avesnois, France, where neighbouring individuals repeat the same pattern. Therefore, environmental control on growth rhythm in Alveolitidae can be excluded; the causes of differences between individuals remain unknown.     

Lipidomics: a new window to biomedical frontiers

Lipids are a highly diverse class of molecules with crucial roles in cellular energy storage, structure and signaling. Lipid homeostasis is fundamental to maintain health, and lipid defects are central to the pathogenesis of important and devastating diseases. Newly emerging advances have facilitated the development of so-called lipidomics technologies and offer an opportunity to elucidate the mechanisms leading to disease. Furthermore, these advances also provide the tools to unravel the complexity of the 'allostatic forces' that allow maintenance of normal cellular/tissue phenotypes through the application of bioenergetically inefficient adaptive mechanisms. An alternative strategy is to focus on tissues with limited allostatic capacity, such as the eye, that could be used as readouts of metabolic stress over time. Identification of these allostatic mechanisms and pathological 'scares' might provide a window to unknown pathogenic mechanisms, as well as facilitate identification of early biomarkers of disease.     

A model invalidation-based approach for elucidating biological signalling pathways,applied to the chemotaxis pathway in R. sphaeroides

Background  

Developing methods for understanding the connectivity of signalling pathways is a major challenge in biological research. For this purpose, mathematical models are routinely developed based on experimental observations, which also allow the prediction of the system behaviour under different experimental conditions. Often, however, the same experimental data can be represented by several competing network models.