Schizosaccharomyces pombe divides by medial fission through the use of an actomyosin-based contractile ring. A division septum is formed centripetally, concomitant with ring constriction. Although several genes essential for cytokinesis have been described previously, enzymes that participate in the assembly of the division septum have not been identified. Here we describe a temperature-sensiti...

Type II collagen is the major collagen of cartilage. However, new collagenous chains have been described in different cartilaginous tissues, recently. The la, 2a and 3a chains were extracted from human and bovine hyaline cartilage [1]. Other minor collagenous components were extracted from neonatal pig and human cartilage noted M, CFI, CF2 [2-4], from bovine nasal cartilage and human interverte...

N-acetylglutamate synthase (NAGS) catalyzes the conversion of AcCoA and L-glutamate to CoA and N-acetyl-L-glutamate (NAG), an obligate cofactor for carbamyl phosphate synthetase I (CPSI) in the urea cycle. NAGS deficiency results in elevated levels of plasma ammonia which is neurotoxic. We report herein the first crystal structure of human NAGS, that of the catalytic N-acetyltransferase (hNAT) ...

Recent studies applying high-throughput sequencing technologies have identified several recurrently mutated genes and pathways in multiple cancer genomes. However, transcriptional consequences from these genomic alterations in cancer genome remain unclear. In this study, we performed integrated and comparative analyses of whole genomes and transcriptomes of 22 hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related he...

Although COPI function on the early secretory pathway in eukaryotes is well established, earlier studies also proposed a nonconventional role for this coat complex in endocytosis in mammalian cells. Here we present results that suggest an involvement for specific COPI subunits in the late steps of endosomal protein sorting in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. First, we found that carboxypeptidase Y (CP...

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Donald Higman. Don was especially attracted to methods with some kind of fundamental simplicity but with sufficient substance to be useful and illuminating. This paper is written in the spirit of this lofty aspiration and also somewhat in the direction of Don’s early interests in homological algebra. The paper begins in Section 1 with a foundational disc...

The ESCRT-0 and ESCRT-I complexes coordinate the clustering of ubiquitinated cargo with intralumenal budding of the endosomal membrane, two essential steps in vacuolar/lysosomal protein sorting from yeast to humans. The 1.85-Å crystal structure of interacting regions of the yeast ESCRT-0 and ESCRT-I complexes reveals that PSDP motifs of the Vps27 ESCRT-0 subunit bind to a novel electropositive ...

Calcineurin is an important mediator that connects the Ca(2+)-dependent signaling to various cellular responses in a wide variety of cell types and organisms. In budding yeast, activated calcineurin exerts its function mainly by regulating the Crz1p/Tcn1 transcription factor. Here, we cloned the fission yeast prz1(+) gene, which encodes a zinc finger transcription factor highly homologous to Cr...

Circulating metabolites associated with insulin sensitivity may represent useful biomarkers, but their causal role in insulin sensitivity and diabetes is less certain. We previously identified novel metabolites correlated with insulin sensitivity measured by the hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp. The top-ranking metabolites were in the glutathione and glycine biosynthesis pathways. We aimed to ...

Numerous studies have revealed the high diversity of cyanophages in marine and freshwater environments, but little is currently known about the diversity of cyanophages in paddy fields, particularly in Northeast (NE) China. To elucidate the genetic diversity of cyanophages in paddy floodwaters in NE China, viral capsid assembly protein gene (g20) sequences from five floodwater samples were ampl...