Hemostasis as an evolutionary development.

A concern of ecotoxicology is to predict to which trophic levels in biocenoses bioaccumulation of compounds or of elements occurs. Transformity, a measure of the energy required to produce and maintain a component or a flow resulting from an energy transformation process, may help predict bioaccumulation potential. This notion derives from two concepts. First, common substances are more likely to be processed by the biosphere. Moreover, the uptake of rare ones from the physical environment by organisms of low trophic levels makes them less unusual to organisms of high trophic levels, which may evolve a capability of processing them. Second, transformity expresses energy relationships between parts of a system. Substances that require more energy to form or concentrate are also the more unusual. The hypothesis was formulated that there is a correlation between the rarity, complexity, and energy required for concentrating a substance, and thus its transformity, and the transformity of the trophic level to which it bioaccumulates. This hypothesis was tested for a set of elements with published data on their biogeochemistry and bioaccumulation and on energy transfers between trophic levels in ecosystems. The transformities of the elements were calculated from the energy required by the biosphere for maintaining a difference in concentration compared to its physical environment. Transformities of corresponding trophic levels were calculated from the energy driving the energy flows. There was a significant rank correlation between the transformity of elements and that of trophic levels. This may be an important generalization in ecotoxicology because it may lead to the possibility of predicting bioaccumulation tendency.

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PubMed1995

Ligand binding profile of the rat metabotropic glutamate receptor mGluR3 expressed in a transfected cell line.

A cDNA clone encoding the rat metabotropic glutamate receptor mGluR3 was stably transfected into human embryonic kidney 293 cells. Receptor-expressing cell lines were characterized by centrifugation binding assays using [3H]glutamate as radioligand. The rank order of affinity was L-glutamate > (1S,3R)-1-aminocyclopentane-1,3-dicarboxylic acid (1S,3R-ACPD) > L(+)-2-amino-3-phosphonopropionic acid (L-AP3) > quisqualic acid > L(+)-2-amino-4-phosphonobutyric acid (L-AP4) > ibotenic acid. The active enantiomers of several phenylglycines displayed Ki values of 300 to 400 microM. The nonactive enantiomers and the standard ionotropic glutamate receptor ligands N-methyl-D-aspartic acid (NMDA), (R,S)-alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) and kainic acid only weakly displaced [3H]glutamate. In this cell line, L-glutamate and (2S,3S,4S)-alpha-(Carboxycyclopropyl)-glycine (L-CCG-I) reduced cAMP levels in a dose-dependent manner. The sensitivity of this system and its easy applicability make it feasible to envisage ligand binding assays on cell lines expressing cloned receptors as useful screening tools to discover and characterize new and specific agonists and antagonists.

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