Category: Uncategorized

IRON SUPPLEMENTS. "Clinical trials which were performed to supplement iron to children in developing countries based on the notion that iron deficiency is associated with growth and mental retardation produced unpredicted results. These studies demonstrated that iron supplementation resulted in higher incidence of or higher mortality from infections such as malaria, diarrhea or bacterial meningitis." https://lnkd.in/eBzy3XB View in LinkedIn

SEPARATE SELECTION. " Plasmids genes are in fact under differential selection while moving through the prokaryotic community, and consequently, they frequently gain and lose genes, revealing a very dynamic organization. This flexibility is mostly due to the abundance of transposable elements they harbor and that facilitate intra- and intermolecular recombination by creating homology regions. Moreover, plasmids can be both vertically and horizontally inherited in a prokaryotic community." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-59 View in LinkedIn

FEEDING THE BEAST. "Iron injections into animals infected with virulent bacteria result in increased death rates, and parenteral iron administration to human infants predisposes them to fatal septicemia." https://lnkd.in/e9yjFnc View in LinkedIn

PRIMITIVE REPLICONS. "Studies on the origin and evolution of plasmids may provide valuable insights on the promiscuous nature of DNA. The first examples of the selfish nature of nucleic acids are exemplified by primordial oligoribonucleotides which evolved into primitive replicons." https://lnkd.in/etHekGu View in LinkedIn

CONFLICTING IRON THERAPEUTIC STRATEGIES. "To date, the implication of divalent metals have been described in two different immune strategies that aim to fight microbial invaders. One consists in depriving microbes of essential divalent metals whereas the other aims at overloading invaders with toxic concentrations of metal." https://lnkd.in/eRyAPb7 View in LinkedIn

FRESH GENES. "Typically, a plasmid includes one or more essential genes encoding replicative functions. In addition, it may harbor one or more genes coding for a variable panoply of accessory metabolic processes and functions that are, in general, different from those encoded by chromosome(s)." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-59 View in LinkedIn

DIVERSE IRON SOURCE EXPLOITATION. "During infection, bacterial pathogens are capable of altering the battlefield to increase the abundance of potential iron sources. Bacterial cytotoxins damage host cells, leading to the release of ferritin while hemolytic toxins lyse erythrocytes, liberating hemoglobin. The resulting inflammatory response includes the release of lactoferrin from secondary granules contained with polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMNs)." https://lnkd.in/epJAeXg View in LinkedIn

PLASMIDS "are actually involved in many accessory functions and constitute, together with "not essential" chromosomal regions, what is referred to as the "dispensable genome" in the microbial pan-genome concept." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-59 View in LinkedIn

IRON MINING. "Bacterial pathogens can also elaborate secreted heme-scavenging molecules that remove heme from host hemoproteins. These molecules, known as hemophores, are functionally analogous to siderophores but are proteins that target heme, whereas siderophores are small molecules that target iron atoms." https://lnkd.in/epJAeXg View in LinkedIn

PLASMID SECOND ROLE. "Plasmids can provide a basis for genomic rearrangements via homologous recombination and so they can facilitate the loss or acquisition of genes during these events, which eventually may lead to horizontal gene transfer (HGT)." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-59 View in LinkedIn