Antioxidants from Callus Technology

Antioxidants are very important compounds that are very vital in human health and they have been proven to reduce the risk of diseases such as cancer in human health. Many researchers have used callus to produce antioxidant and most of them used different techniques to get reasonable amounts of antioxidants. The technique used determines the number of antioxidants that will be produced from any explants. Callus Technology involves the techniques of producing callus and metabolites in the presence of explants using different plant hormonal combination in media, different environmental culture condition (light, relative humidity and tempreture), use of elicitors and under a sterile conditions. Callus technology is very promising due to its ability to produce a larger quantity of metabolites (antioxidants) compare to the raw extract of its explants. The use of callus to produce antioxidants is very important and very useful in discovering new plants as a source of antioxidants. The use of callus technology was reviewed for production of antioxidant from the callus of the following plants: Sericostoma pauciflorum, Helicteres angustifolia L, Lepidium sativum L, Randia echinocarpa, Andrographis paniculata Nees, Citrullus colocynthis, Rauwolfia vomitoria Afzel, Decalepis hamiltonii, Bacopa monnieri (Linn.) and Isodon rugosus (Wall. Ex Benth). Callus technology can be utilized to produce antioxidants and other metabolites in industrial quantity. Most of the metabolites from plants have been found to have medicinal values or useful to mankind and antioxidant is one of them.

Single organoid RNA-sequencing reveals high organoid-to-organoid variability

Over the last decades, organoids have been established from the majority of tissue resident stem and iPS cells. They hold great promise for our understanding of mammalian organ development, but also for the study of disease or even personalized medicine. In recent years, several reports hinted at intraculture organoid variability, but a systematic analysis of such a heterogeneity has not been performed before. Here, we used RNA-seq of individual organoids to address this question. Importantly, we find that batch-to-batch variation is very low, even when prepared by different researchers. On the other hand, there is organoid-to-organoid variability within a culture. Using differential gene expression, we did not identify specific pathways that drive this variability, pointing towards possible effects of the microenvironment within the culture condition. Taken together, our study provides a framework for organoid researchers to properly consider experimental design.

The Heterotrimeric Transcription Factor CCAAT-Binding Complex and Ca 2+ -CrzA Signaling Reversely Regulate the Transition between Fungal Hyphal Growth and Asexual Reproduction

A precisely timed switch between vegetative hyphal growth and asexual development is a crucial process for the filamentous fungal long-term survival, dissemination, biomass production, and virulence. However, under the submerged culture condition, filamentous fungi would undergo constant vegetative growth whereas asexual conidiation rarely occurs.

When development is constantly but weakly perturbed - Canalization by microRNAs

Recent studies have increasingly pointed to microRNAs (miRNAs) as the agent of GRN (gene regulatory network) stabilization as well as developmental canalization against constant but small environmental perturbations. Since the complete removal of miRNAs is lethal, we construct a Dicer-1 knockdown line (dcr-1 KD) in Drosophila that modestly reduces all miRNAs. We hypothesize that flies with modest miRNA reductions will gradually deviate from the developmental norm, resulting in late-stage failures such as shortened longevity. In the optimal culture condition, the survival to adulthood is indeed normal in the dcr-1 KD line but, importantly, adult longevity is reduced by ∼ 90%. When flies are stressed by high temperature, dcr-1 KD induces lethality earlier in late pupation and, as the perturbations are shifted earlier, the affected stages are shifted correspondingly. We further show that the developmental failure is associated with GRN aberration in the larval stages even before phenotypic aberrations become observable. Hence, in late stages of development with deviations piling up, GRN would be increasingly in need of stabilization. In conclusion, miRNAs appear to be the genome’s solution to weak but constant environmental perturbations.