Electrospun gelatin nanofibers attract great interest as a natural biomaterial for cartilage and tendon repair despite their high solubility in aqueous solution, which makes them also difficult to crosslink by means of chemical agents. In this work, we explore the efficiency of non-equilibrium atmospheric pressure plasma in stabilizing gelatin nanofibers. We demonstrate that plasma represents a...

In vivo studies of murein biosynthesis show that newly synthesized murein unexpectedly differs in its chemical composition from preexisting murein. New murein is loosely crosslinked with the preexisting sacculus; in a maturation process involving further transpeptidation, the final stage of crosslinkage in murein is achieved. Newly inserted murein initially carries pentapeptide subunits, which ...

This paper describes the approaches of NTHU in the NTCIR-10 Cross-Lingual Link Discovery task, also named CrossLink-2. In this task, we aim to discover valuable anchors in Chinese, Japanese or Korean (CJK) articles and to link these anchors to related English Wikipedia pages. To achieve the objective, we do not only depend on Wikipedia’s distinguishing features (e.g. anchor links information an...

During replication-coupled DNA interstrand crosslink (ICL) repair, the XPF-ERCC1 endonuclease is required for the incisions that release, or "unhook", ICLs, but the mechanism of ICL unhooking remains largely unknown. Incisions are triggered when the nascent leading strand of a replication fork strikes the ICL Here, we report that while purified XPF-ERCC1 incises simple ICL-containing model repl...

Extracellular aging--accumulating molecular damage by glycation, oxidation, and crosslinking of long-lived extracellular proteins, mainly collagen and elastin--is a major cause of several important human aging pathologies. Crosslinking increases mechanical stiffness of blood vessels and urinary bladder. Crosslinking impairs the functioning of the kidney, heart, retina, and other tissues and org...

In Parkinson's disease (PD), conformational changes in the alpha-synuclein monomer precede the formation of Lewy bodies. We examined postmortem PD and undiseased (control) substantia nigra for evidence of pathological crosslinking of alpha-synuclein by tissue transglutaminase (tTG) using immunohistochemistry, immunoprecipitation, and Western blot. Consistent with previous reports, we found that...

The Formation Autonomy Spacecraft with Thrust, Relnav, Attitude, and Crosslink (FASTRAC) project from the University of Texas at Austin has developed two nanosatellites as the winner of the University Nanosat-3 Competition. Both satellites have been manifested for a launch provided by the Space Test Program (STP) in December of 2009. The FASTRAC satellites will demonstrate the following enablin...

RNA editing by ADARs can change the coding potential of protein-coding mRNAs. So far, this type of RNA editing has mainly been shown to affect RNAs expressed in the nervous system with much lower editing levels being observed in other tissues. The actin crosslinking proteins filamin α and filamin β are widely expressed in most tissues. The mRNAs encoding either protein are edited at the same po...

Defining mechanisms of direct-acting antivirals facilitates drug development and our understanding of virus function. Heteroaryldihydropyrimidines (HAPs) inappropriately activate assembly of hepatitis B virus (HBV) core protein (Cp), suppressing formation of virions. We examined a fluorophore-labeled HAP, HAP-TAMRA. HAP-TAMRA induced Cp assembly and also bound pre-assembled capsids. Kinetic and...