Ajit Varki
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Ajit Varki
Ajit Varki is a physician-scientist who is distinguished professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine, co-director of the Glycobiology Research and Training Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and co-director of the UCSD/Salk Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA). He is also executive editor of the textbook ''Essentials of Glycobiology'' and distinguished visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. He is a specialist advisor to the Human Gene Nomenclature Committee. Education and biography Varki went to the Bishop Cotton Boys' School, Bangalore, India during which time he was also strongly influenced by his maternal grandfather Pothan Joseph, a famous journalist and founding editor of many Indian newspapers, including Deccan Herald. He went on to receive basic training in physiology, medicine, biology, and biochemistry at the Christ ...
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University Of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is the southernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California, and offers over 200 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, enrolling 33,096 undergraduate and 9,872 graduate students. The university occupies near the coast of the Pacific Ocean, with the main campus resting on approximately . UC San Diego is ranked among the best universities in the world by major college and university rankings. UC San Diego consists of twelve undergraduate, graduate and professional schools as well as seven undergraduate residential colleges. It received over 140,000 applications for undergraduate admissions in Fall 2021, making it the second most applied-to university in the United States. UC San Diego H ...
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PubMed Central
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge. PubMed Central is distinct from PubMed. PubMed Central is a free digital archive of full articles, accessible to anyone from anywhere via a web browser (with varying provisions for reuse). Conversely, although PubMed is a searchable database of biomedical citations and abstracts, the ful ...
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Open Access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright. The main focus of the open access movement is "peer reviewed research literature". Historically, this has centered mainly on print-based academic journals. Whereas non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges, open-access journals are characterised by funding models which do not require the reader to pay to read the journal's contents, relying instead on author fees or on public funding, subsidies and sponsorships. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journa ...
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Journal Of Clinical Investigation
The ''Journal of Clinical Investigation'' is a twice-monthly peer-reviewed medical journal covering biomedical research. It was established in 1924 and is published by the American Society for Clinical Investigation. Articles focus on the mechanisms of disease, with an emphasis on basic research, early-stage clinical studies in humans, and new research tools and techniques. The journal also publishes reviews in edited series or as stand-alone articles, commentaries on research, editorials, and feature items. The editor-in-chief is Elizabeth M. McNally (Northwestern University). Abstracting and indexing The journal is abstracted and indexed in: Editors-in-chief The following persons have been editor-in-chief of the journal: Most cited articles The following articles have received the most citations , according to Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) fr ...
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Phenome
A phenome, similar to phenotype, is the set of all traits expressed by a cell, tissue, organ, organism, or species. Just as the genome and proteome signify all of an organism's genes and proteins, the phenome represents the sum of its phenotypic traits. Examples of human phenotypic traits are skin color, eye color, body height, or specific personality characteristics. Although any phenotype of any organism has a basis in its genotype, phenotypic expression may be influenced by environmental influences, mutation, and genetic variation such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or a combination of these factors. Phenomics is the study of the phenome and how it is determined, particularly when studied in relation to the set of all genes ( genomics) or all proteins ( proteomics). Origin and usage The term was first used by Davis in 1949, "We here propose the name ''phenome'' for the sum total of extragenic, non-autoreproductive portions of the cell, whether cytoplasmic or ...
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Common Chimpanzee
The chimpanzee (''Pan troglodytes''), also known as simply the chimp, is a species of Hominidae, great ape native to the forest and savannah of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed subspecies. When its close relative the bonobo was more commonly known as the pygmy chimpanzee, this species was often called the common chimpanzee or the robust chimpanzee. The chimpanzee and the bonobo are the only species in the genus Pan (genus), ''Pan''. Evidence from fossils and DNA sequencing shows that ''Pan'' is a sister taxon to the Human evolution, human lineage and is humans' closest living relative. The chimpanzee is covered in coarse black hair, but has a bare face, fingers, toes, palms of the hands, and soles of the feet. It is larger and more Robustness (morphology), robust than the bonobo, weighing for males and for females and standing . The chimpanzee lives in groups that range in size from 15 to 150 members, although individuals travel and forag ...
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Human Evolution
Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of ''Homo sapiens'' as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual development of traits such as human bipedalism and language, as well as interbreeding with other hominins, which indicate that human evolution was not linear but a web.Human Hybrids
(PDF). Michael F. Hammer. ''Scientific American'', May 2013.
The study of human evolution involves scientific disciplines, including
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Great Apes
The Hominidae (), whose members are known as the great apes or hominids (), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: '' Pongo'' (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); ''Gorilla'' (the eastern and western gorilla); '' Pan'' (the chimpanzee and the bonobo); and ''Homo'', of which only modern humans remain. Several revisions in classifying the great apes have caused the use of the term ''"hominid"'' to vary over time. The original meaning of "hominid" referred only to humans (''Homo'') and their closest extinct relatives. However, by the 1990s humans, apes, and their ancestors were considered to be "hominids". The earlier restrictive meaning has now been largely assumed by the term ''"hominin"'', which comprises all members of the human clade after the split from the chimpanzees (''Pan''). The current meaning of "hominid" includes all the great apes including humans. Usage still varies, however, and some scientists and layper ...
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Lectins
Lectins are carbohydrate-binding proteins that are highly specific for sugar groups that are part of other molecules, so cause agglutination of particular cells or precipitation of glycoconjugates and polysaccharides. Lectins have a role in recognition at the cellular and molecular level and play numerous roles in biological recognition phenomena involving cells, carbohydrates, and proteins. Lectins also mediate attachment and binding of bacteria, viruses, and fungi to their intended targets. Lectins are ubiquitous in nature and are found in many foods. Some foods, such as beans and grains, need to be cooked, fermented or sprouted to reduce lectin content. Some lectins are beneficial, such as CLEC11A, which promotes bone growth, while others may be powerful toxins such as ricin. Lectins may be disabled by specific mono- and oligosaccharides, which bind to ingested lectins from grains, legumes, nightshade plants, and dairy; binding can prevent their attachment to the carbohydr ...
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Selectins
The selectins (cluster of differentiation 62 or CD62) are a family of cell adhesion molecules (or CAMs). All selectins are single-chain transmembrane glycoproteins that share similar properties to C-type lectins due to a related amino terminus and calcium-dependent binding. Selectins bind to sugar moieties and so are considered to be a type of lectin, cell adhesion proteins that bind sugar polymers. Structure All three known members of the selectin family (L-, E-, and P-selectin) share a similar cassette structure: an N-terminal, calcium-dependent lectin domain, an epidermal growth factor (EGF)-like domain, a variable number of consensus repeat units (2, 6, and 9 for L-, E-, and P-selectin, respectively), a transmembrane domain (TM) and an intracellular cytoplasmic tail (cyto). The transmembrane and cytoplasmic parts are not conserved across the selectins being responsible for their targeting to different compartments. Though they share common elements, their tissue distribut ...
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Sialic Acids
Sialic acids are a class of alpha-keto acid sugars with a nine-carbon backbone. The term "sialic acid" (from the Greek for saliva, - ''síalon'') was first introduced by Swedish biochemist Gunnar Blix in 1952. The most common member of this group is ''N''-acetylneuraminic acid (Neu5Ac or NANA) found in animals and some prokaryotes. Sialic acids are found widely distributed in animal tissues and related forms are found to a lesser extent in other organisms like in some micro-algae, bacteria and archaea. Sialic acids are commonly part of glycoproteins, glycolipids or gangliosides, where they decorate the end of sugar chains at the surface of cells or soluble proteins. However, sialic acids have been also observed in ''Drosophila'' embryos and other insects. Generally, plants seem not to contain or display sialic acids. In humans the brain has the highest sialic acid content, where these acids play an important role in neural transmission and ganglioside structure in synaptogene ...
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Glycobiology
Defined in the narrowest sense, glycobiology is the study of the structure, biosynthesis, and biology of saccharides (sugar chains or glycans) that are widely distributed in nature. Sugars or saccharides are essential components of all living things and aspects of the various roles they play in biology are researched in various medical, biochemical and biotechnological fields. History According to ''Oxford English Dictionary'' the specific term ''glycobiology'' was coined in 1988 by Prof. Raymond Dwek to recognize the coming together of the traditional disciplines of carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry. This coming together was as a result of a much greater understanding of the cellular and molecular biology of glycans. However, as early as the late nineteenth century pioneering efforts were being made by Emil Fisher to establish the structure of some basic sugar molecules. Each year the Society of Glycobiology awards the Rosalind Kornfeld award for lifetime achievement in the ...
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