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Evolution
Published in Paul Pumpens, Single-Stranded RNA Phages, 2020
This impressive study was previewed by Lehman (2012), who emphasized the important moment that the compartmentalization into the water-in-oil droplets was able to ameliorate the problem of the parasitic sequences, but only if the droplets were small. In the opinion of the expert, this work helped to both recapitulate abiogenesis and optimize synthetic biology.
The pleasures of procreation: traditional and biomedical theories of conception
Published in Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals, 2020
Whatever the preferred line of attack, preformation theories budded in the 1670s and blossomed in the first half of the eighteenth century.49 They presented an image of a mono-parental embryo in which conception implied simply an enlargement of what was already there.50 There was no ‘creation’ per se. The power of this new theory was based in part on microscopic findings. Indeed the microscope, in revealing a miniature hidden world, fired men’s imaginations with the idea of worlds even tinier. The theory was also supported by ideological concerns. It nicely countered the radically rationalist view of the Cartesians that the law of motion had in the beginning created life which in turn supported the concept of abiogenesis or spontaneous generation. The idea of préexistence or emboîtement also complemented seventeenth-century Calvinist and Jansenist ideas of predestination. Science could be seen as confirming the religious idea that all men had been created by God at one point in time.51 For example, Swammerdam noted that in embryology even the foundation of original sin itself would already have been discovered, since the whole of mankind would have been concealed in the loins of Adam and Eve, and to this could be added as a necessary consequence that when these eggs have been exhausted the end of mankind will be at hand.52
A
Published in Anton Sebastian, A Dictionary of the History of Medicine, 2018
Abiogenesis [Greek: a, without + bios, life + genesis, origin] The doctrine of the origin of living things from inorganic matter. First proposed by Anaximander around 570 BC. See germ theory of disease.
Echoes of William Gowers’s concept of abiotrophy
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2022
Gilberto Levy, Bruce Levin, Eliasz Engelhardt
One reason for the term falling into disuse is the clumsiness of its etymological derivation. Kehrer’s (1936, 227) preference for “bioatrophy” is related to the fact that abiotrophy may be misinterpreted as spontaneous (nonbiological) nutrition, similarly to “abiogenesis” or spontaneous generation, a concept espoused among others by Henry Charlton Bastian (1837–1915), a colleague of Gowers at the National Hospital (Critchley 1960; Pearce 2010). Other plausible reasons include the different meaning attached to nutrition today, the vagueness of the notion of vitality as used by Gowers, the view that abiotrophy simply meant premature aging, and the competition with related terms or expressions. Yet the distribution in Figure 2, other than evidencing that the usage of the term abiotrophy and its derivatives has been waning in the medical literature over recent years, shows a long and heavy right tail, suggesting that the term has lingered and may well gain new momentum.
Characterization of free fatty acid receptors expression in an obesity rat model with high sucrose diet
Published in Journal of Receptors and Signal Transduction, 2018
Fabián Meza-Cuenca, J. M. L. Medina-Contreras, Patrick Mailloux-Salinas, Luis A. Bautista-Hernández, Beatríz Buentello-Volante, Alfredo Domínguez-López, Yonathan Garfias, P. Valentín Correa-López, Víctor M. Bautista de Lucio, Guadalupe Bravo
Presently, in comparison with GPR41 and GPR43, the GPR 120 function is the lipid-sensoring and has a main role in the regulation on metabolism homeostasis [27,28]. Its distribution differs between species, such as the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, tongue and adipose tissue, and its agonists (medium to long chain of fatty acids) that interacts with Gαq/11, a heterotrimeric G-protein, leading to PLC activation which further induces glucose transporter 4 (GLUT 4) translocation to cell membranes in adipocytes [27]. It has an important role in abiogenesis [3] and also, it is induced in the stromal vascular fraction of adipose tissue, during high-fat diet [28]. On normal chow diets, the KO showed moderate insulin resistance with no changes in food intake or body weight, contrary on high-fat diet, where the KO group gained more weight than wild-type controls, whereas differences in energy expenditure were no longer present when the animals reached 15 weeks of age [28]. This might explain the no statistical difference in the mRNA expression of the GPR 120 in our results, showed in both adipose tissues (AAT and SAT) after 20 weeks of obesity induction with a high sucrose diet, contrary to, Ichumura et al. [29] that showed in the same two adipose tissues in obese individuals than in lean controls. The protein expression of this receptor in our statistics data showed different as well as the GPR41 and GPR43, where the GPR120 increased in the subcutaneous obesity group, in comparison with the abdominal where no statistical differences were found. These results are the first report of the protein expression in two different adipose tissues in two distant and different adipose tissue metabolism, showing a striking example of the protein synthesis of the GPR120 in obesity in vivo conditions after a 20 weeks of high sucrose diet, indicating the imperative propose of future studies that may resolve some of these controversies among these three receptors in different conditions. Finally, the variability in our wild-type rat model had with the knock out studies. These differences generally cannot reflect broadly increased or decreased variability in the knockouts compared with wild-types. In particular, genes mediating negative feedback would tend to buffer stochastic effects, so that their loss could increase variability [30] and the protein expression protocols in order to validate the specificity of the staining remains a major challenge toward the further characterization of the GPR41, 43 and 120 receptors that are involved in a variety of physiological functions.