Project description:These experiments were designed to follow the seasonal changes in the transcriptome of field-grown leafy spurge crown buds. The goal was to identify specific signaling pathways and marker genes characteristic to the changes that occur when the buds transitioned from paradormancy through endodormancy and into ecodormancy. Keywords: Time course seasonal dormancy
Project description:Aside from their amino acid content, dairy proteins are valuable for their ability to carry encrypted bioactive peptides whose activities are latent until released by digestive enzymes or endogenous enzymes within the food. Peptides can possess a wide variety of functionalities, such as antibacterial, antihypertensive, and antioxidative properties, as demonstrated by in vitro and in vivo studies. This phenomenon raises the question as to what impact various traditional cheese-making processes have on the formation of bioactive peptides in the resulting products. In this study, we have profiled the naturally-occurring peptides in two hard and two soft traditional cheeses and have identified their known bioactive sequences. While past studies have typically identified fewer than 100 peptide sequences in a single cheese, we have used modern instrumentation to identify between 2900 and 4700 sequences per cheese, an increase by a factor of about 50. We demonstrated substantial variations in proteolysis and peptide formation between the interior and rind of each cheese, which we ascribed to the differences in microbial composition between these regions. We identified a total of 111 bioactive sequences among the four cheeses, with the greatest number of sequences, 89, originating from Mimolette. The most common bioactivities identified were antimicrobial and inhibition of the angiotensin-converting enzyme. This work revealed that cheese proteolysis and the resulting peptidomes are more complex than originally thought in terms of the number of peptides released, variation in peptidome across sites within a single cheese, and variation in bioactive peptides among cheese-making techniques.
Project description:Seasonal wood development results in two distinct wood types: earlywood (EW) and latewood (LW), which is the major cause of wood qaulity variation. We investigate transcriptome reorganization during seasonal wood development in radiata pine using a newly developed 18k cDNA microarrays.