The MADS domain homeotic proteins APETALA1 (AP1), APETALA3 (AP3), PISTILLATA (PI), and AGAMOUS (AG) combinatorially specify the identity of Arabidopsis floral organs. AP1/AP1, AG/AG, and AP3/PI dimers bind to similar CArG box sequences; thus, differences in DNA-binding specificity among these proteins do not seem to be the origin of their distinct organ identity properties. To assess the overal...

Type IV neuronal intermediate filament proteins consist of alpha-internexin, which can self-assemble into filaments and the neurofilament triplet proteins, which are obligate heteropolymers, at least in rodents. These IF proteins therefore provide good systems for elucidating the mechanism of intermediate filament assembly. To analyze the roles of the head domains of these proteins in contribut...

Putative conformational switching and inhibitory regions in the Microviridae external scaffolding protein were investigated. Substitutions for glycine 61, hypothesized to promote a postdimerization conformational switch, have dominant lethal phenotypes. In previous studies, chimeric alpha3/phiX174 proteins for structures alpha-helix 1 and loop 6/alpha-helix 7 inhibited phiX174 morphogenesis whe...

The anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) on 2p23 is a tyrosine kinase that forms chimeric fusions with numerous translocation partners. We describe a mass spectrometry-based approach for the identification of ALK fusion partners. This approach accurately identified the nucleophosmin (NPM)-ALK fusion protein in an anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL)-derived cell line carrying the t(2;5)(p23;q35), ...

Plants are increasingly being used for the production of recombinant proteins. One reason is that plants are highly amenable to glycan engineering processes and allow the production of therapeutic proteins with increased efficacies due to optimized glycosylation profiles. Removal and insertion of glycosylation reactions by knock-out/knock-down approaches and introduction of glycosylation enzyme...

Epitope tagging is a method of expressing proteins whereby an epitope for a specific monoclonal antibody is fused to a target protein using recombinant DNA techniques. The aim of this study was to sub-clone the peroxisomal protein (PEP) cDNA into a mammalian expression vector leading to the formation of a  chimeric PEP-cDNA containing the FLAG epitope. The FLAG-PEP recombinant cDNA was construc...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) causes not only endemics via a fecal-oral route but also sporadic cases via zoonotic transmission or blood transfusion. HEV-like particles (HEV-LP) produced by using a baculovirus expression system are considered a candidate for mucosal vaccines for HEV infection. In this study, we attempted to produce a chimeric HEV-LP presenting various foreign epitopes on its surface....

HIV-1 acquisition can be prevented by broadly neutralizing antibodies (BrNAbs) that target the envelope glycoprotein complex (Env). An ideal vaccine should therefore be able to induce BrNAbs that can provide immunity over a prolonged period of time, but the low intrinsic immunogenicity of HIV-1 Env makes the elicitation of such BrNAbs challenging. Co-stimulatory molecules can increase the immun...

Chimeric Fc receptors, consisting of the IgG-binding domains of both staphylococcal protein A and streptococcal protein G, were constructed. An efficient bacterial expression system was used to produce the recombinant proteins, which vary in size and number of IgG-binding domains. The purified receptors were analyzed by immunodiffusion and a competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to esta...