Archive of the AB

 


EUSJA General Assembly

eusja.jpg EUSJA General Assembly
& EUSJA Study Trip

Prague, Czech Republic
March 14–17, 2013

Important links

International cooperation

 

ESO

EUSCEA

AlphaGalileo

WFSJ

 

 

Books

English books prepared for publication by Academy bulletin

 

Akademie věd České republiky / The Czech Academy of Sciences 2014 a 2015

rocenka_obalka_en.jpg
The Czech Academy of Sciences has issued a report accounting selected research results achieved by its scientific institutes in all research areas in 2014 and in early 2015.
Full version you can find here.

 

kniha
VILLA LANNA IN PRAGUE
The new english expanded edition 

 

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SAYING IT ...ON PAPER


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Czech scientists announce discovery in battle against ticks

Scientists in the Czech city of České Budějovice have discovered a protein that may reduce the appetite of ticks for human blood. Ticks have become an increasing problem in the summer months, and can carry Lyme’s disease as well as encephalitis, both of which can prove very dangerous to human health.

The discover was published in prestige magazine Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Knockdown of proteins involved in iron metabolism limits tick reproduction and development.

Ondrej Hajduseka, Daniel Sojka, Petr Kopacek, Veronika Buresova, Zdenek Franta, Ivo Sauman, Joy Winzerling and Libor Grubhoffer

Ticks are among the most important vectors of a wide range of human and animal diseases. During blood feeding, ticks are exposed to an enormous amount of free iron that must be appropriately used and detoxified. However, the mechanism of iron metabolism in ticks is poorly understood. Here, we show that ticks possess a complex system that efficiently utilizes, stores and transports non-heme iron within the tick body. We have characterized a new secreted ferritin (FER2) and an iron regulatory protein (IRP1) from the sheep tick, Ixodes ricinus, and have demonstrated their relationship to a previously described tick intracellular ferritin (FER1). By using RNA interference-mediated gene silencing in the tick, we show that synthesis of FER1, but not of FER2, is subject to IRP1-mediated translational control. Further, we find that depletion of FER2 from the tick plasma leads to a loss of FER1 expression in the salivary glands and ovaries that normally follows blood ingestion. We therefore suggest that secreted FER2 functions as the primary transporter of non-heme iron between the tick gut and the peripheral tissues. Silencing of the fer1, fer2, and irp1 genes by RNAi has an adverse impact on hatching rate and decreases postbloodmeal weight in tick females. Importantly, knockdown of fer2 dramatically impairs the ability of ticks to feed, thus making FER2 a promising candidate for development of an efficient anti-tick vaccine.

4 Feb 2009