Niemann-Pick disease type C is a rare, fatal neurodegenerative disorder characterized by massive intracellular accumulation of cholesterol. In most cases, loss-of-function mutations in NPC1 gene that encodes for a lysosomal cholesterol transporter NPC1 are responsible for the disease, and more than half of the mutations are considered to interfere with biogenesis or folding of the protein. Previously we have identified a series of oxysterol derivatives and phenanthridine-6-one derivatives as pharmacological chaperones, small molecules that rescue...

Antibiotics and dietary habits can affect the gut microbial community, influencing disease susceptibility. Although the influence of microbiota on the postnatal environment has been well documented, much less is known regarding the impact of gut microbiota at the embryonic stage. Here, we show that maternal microbiota shapes the metabolic system of offspring. During pregnancy, short-chain fatty acids produced by the maternal microbiota dictate the differentiation of neural, intestinal, and pancreatic cells through embryonic GPR41 and...

The microbiome in the hindgut of wood-feeding termites comprises various species of bacteria, archaea, and protists. This gut community is indispensable for the termite, which thrives solely on recalcitrant and nitrogen-poor wood. However, the difficulty in culturing these microorganisms has hindered our understanding of the function of each species in the gut. Although protists predominate in the termite gut microbiome and play a major role in wood digestion, very few culture-independent studies have explored the...

Negative interspecific mating interactions, known as reproductive interference, can hamper species coexistence in a local patch and promote niche partitioning or geographical segregation of closely related species. Conspecific sperm precedence (CSP), which occurs when females that have mated with both conspecific and heterospecific males preferentially use conspecific sperm for fertilization, might contribute to species coexistence by mitigating the costs of interspecific mating and hybridization. We discussed whether two species exhibiting CSP can coexist in a...

This dataset is associated with ‘Quantification of Ebola virus replication kinetics in vitro’. In the paper, a mathematical model is developed to describe the replication of Ebola virus in Vero cells. The model is parametrised using measurements of total and infectious extracellular virus at three different multiplicities of infection. The results provide insights into the distribution of time an infected cell spends in the eclipse phase (the period between infection and the start of virus...

Circadian rhythms, their free-running periods and strength of the rhythm are often used as indicators of biological clocks, and there is evidence that the free-running periods of circadian rhythm are not affected by environmental factors like temperature. However, there are few studies of environmental effects on the power of rhythms and it is not clear if temperature compensation is universal. Additionally, genetic variation and phenotypic plasticity in biological clocks are important for understanding the evolution...

Spider Major Ampullate (MA) silk, with its combination of strength and extensibility, outperforms any synthetic equivalents. There is thus much interest in understanding its underlying materiome. While expression of the different silk proteins (spidroins) appears an integral component of silk performance, our understanding of the nature of the relationship between the spidroins, their constituent amino acids, and MA silk mechanics is ambiguous. To provide clarity on these relationships across spider species we performed a meta-analysis...