WNT5A signaling affects pituitary gland shape

Wnt signaling is important in organogenesis, and aberrant signaling in mature cells is associated with tumorigenesis. Several members of the Wnt family of signaling molecules are expressed in the developing pituitary gland. Wnt5a is expressed in the neuroectoderm that induces pituitary gland development and has been proposed to influence pituitary cell specification. We discovered that mice deficient in Wnt5a display abnormal morphology in the dorsal part of the developing pituitary. The expression of downstream effectors of the canonical Wnt pathway is not altered, and expression of genes in other signaling pathways such as Shh, Fgf8, Fgf10 and Fgfr2b is intact. Prop1 and Hesx1 are also important for normal shape of the pituitary primordium, but their expression is unaltered in the Wnt5a mutants. Specification of the hormone-producing cell types of the mature anterior pituitary gland occurs appropriately. This study suggests that the primary role of Wnt5a in the developing pituitary gland is in establishment of the shape of the gland.     

Molecular characterization and immunohistochemical localization of a mitogen-activated protein kinase, Accp38b, from Apis cerana cerana

The p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) is involved in various processes, including stress responses, development, and differentiation. However, little information on p38 MAPK in insects is available. In this study, a p38 MAPK gene, Accp38b, was isolated from Apis cerana cerana and characterized. The quantitative real-time PCR (Q-PCR) analysis revealed that Accp38b was induced by multiple stressors. Notably, the expression of Accp38b was relatively higher in the pupae phase than in other developmental phases. During the pupae phase, Accp38b expression was higher in the thorax than in the head and abdomen and higher in the fat body than in the muscle and midgut. Immunohistochemisty showed significant positive staining of Accp38b in sections from the brain, eyes, fat body, and midgut of A. cerana cerana. These results suggest that Accp38b may play a crucial role in stress responses and have multiple aspects function during development.     

The role of olfactory cues in mother–pup,groupmate, and sex recognition of lesser flat‐headed bats,Tylonycteris pachypus

Tylonycteris pachypus is a gregarious bat species with tens of individuals in a colony. The mechanisms by which mother bats recognize their pups and adult bats recognize each other are not clear. We hypothesized that such recognition is achieved by chemical discrimination and performed experiments to test the hypothesis. Results showed that mother bats were much more attracted to the scent from their own pups. For adult bats, females were attracted to the scent from both male and female groupmates but had a higher preference to the scent from female than from male groupmates. Male bats were much more attracted to the scent from male groupmates while showed no preference to the scent from female groupmates. Within a group, both female and male bats had no difference in preference to the scent from the same or opposite sex. These results suggest that mother–pup and groupmate recognition of T. pachypus can be achieved by olfactory cues.     

SIDD: A Semantically Integrated Database towards a Global View of Human Disease

Background

A number of databases have been developed to collect disease-related molecular, phenotypic and environmental features (DR-MPEs), such as genes, non-coding RNAs, genetic variations, drugs, phenotypes and environmental factors. However, each of current databases focused on only one or two DR-MPEs. There is an urgent demand to develop an integrated database, which can establish semantic associations among disease-related databases and link them to provide a global view of human disease at the biological level. This database, once developed, will facilitate researchers to query various DR-MPEs through disease, and investigate disease mechanisms from different types of data.

Methodology

To establish an integrated disease-associated database, disease vocabularies used in different databases are mapped to Disease Ontology (DO) through semantic match. 4,284 and 4,186 disease terms from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) respectively are mapped to DO. Then, the relationships between DR-MPEs and diseases are extracted and merged from different source databases for reducing the data redundancy.

Conclusions

A semantically integrated disease-associated database (SIDD) is developed, which integrates 18 disease-associated databases, for researchers to browse multiple types of DR-MPEs in a view. A web interface allows easy navigation for querying information through browsing a disease ontology tree or searching a disease term. Furthermore, a network visualization tool using Cytoscape Web plugin has been implemented in SIDD. It enhances the SIDD usage when viewing the relationships between diseases and DR-MPEs. The current version of SIDD (Jul 2013) documents 4,465,131 entries relating to 139,365 DR-MPEs, and to 3,824 human diseases. The database can be freely accessed from: http://mlg.hit.edu.cn/SIDD.     

Temporal properties of dual-peak responses of mouse retinal ganglion cells and effects of inhibitory pathways

Dual-peak responses of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are observed in various species, previous researches suggested that both response peaks were involved in retinal information coding. In the present study, we investigated the temporal properties of the dual-peak responses recorded in mouse RGCs elicited by spatially homogeneous light flashes and the effect of the inhibitory inputs mediated by GABAergic and/or glycinergic pathways. We found that the two peaks in the dual-peak responses exhibited distinct temporal dynamics, similar to that of short-latency and long-latency single-peak responses respectively. Pharmacological studies demonstrated that the application of exogenous GABA or glycine greatly suppressed or even eliminated the second peak of the cells’ firing activities, while little change was induced in the first peak. Co-application of glycine and GABA led to complete elimination of the second peak. Moreover, application of picrotoxin or strychnine induced dual-peak responses in some cells with transient responses by unmasking a second response phase. These results suggest that both GABAergic and glycinergic pathways are involved in the dual-peak responses of the mouse RGCs, and the two response peaks may arise from distinct pathways that would converge on the ganglion cells.