Bacterial diversity among environmental samples is commonly assessed with PCR-amplified 16S rRNA gene (16S) sequences. Perceived diversity, however, can be influenced by sample preparation, primer selection, and formation of chimeric 16S amplification products. Chimeras are hybrid products between multiple parent sequences that can be falsely interpreted as novel organisms, thus inflating appar...

Ca2+-sensitive adenylyl cyclases are key integrators of Ca2+ and cAMP signaling. To selectively probe dynamic changes in [Ca2+]i at the plasma membrane where adenylyl cyclases reside, a full-length, Ca2+-inhibitable type VI adenylyl cyclase/aequorin chimera has been constructed by a two-stage polymerase chain reaction method. The expressed adenylyl cyclase/aequorin chimera was appropriately loc...

Networks of coupled oscillators in chimera states are characterized by an intriguing interplay of synchronous and asynchronous motion. While chimera states were initially discovered in mathematical model systems, there is growing experimental and conceptual evidence that they manifest themselves also in natural and man-made networks. In real-world systems, however, synchronization and desynchro...

Radiation therapy is a highly effective tool for treating all stages of prostate cancer, from curative approaches in localized disease to palliative care and enhanced survival for patients with distant bone metastases. The therapeutic index of these approaches may be enhanced with targeted radiation-sensitizing agents. Aptamers are promising nucleic acid delivery agents for short interfering RN...

BACKGROUND It is known that in vivo human prion protein (PrP) have the tendency to form fibril deposits and are associated with infectious fatal prion diseases, while the rabbit PrP does not readily form fibrils and is unlikely to cause prion diseases. Although we have previously demonstrated that amyloid fibrils formed by the rabbit PrP and the human PrP have different secondary structures and...

Lubin et al recently described a new approach that enables the generation of human/mouse chimera by adoptive transfer of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) into lethally irradiated normal strains of mice, radioprotected with bone marrow (BM) from donors with severe combined immune deficiency (SCID). In the present study, we demonstrate in such human/mouse chimera a marked humoral r...

We have studied interactions between nucleocapsids and glycoproteins required for budding of alphaviruses, using Ross River virus-Sindbis virus chimeras in which the nucleocapsid protein is derived from one virus and the envelope glycoproteins are derived from the second virus. A virus containing the Ross River virus genome in which the capsid protein had been replaced with that from Sindbis vi...

We study the emergence of chimera states in a multilayer neuronal network, where one layer is composed of coupled and the other layer of uncoupled neurons. Through the multilayer structure, the layer with coupled neurons acts as the medium by means of which neurons in the uncoupled layer share information in spite of the absence of physical connections among them. Neurons in the coupled layer a...

The D-Ala-D-Ala carboxypeptidases/transpeptidases (penicillin-binding proteins, PBPs) share considerable structural homology with class A beta-lactamases (EC 3.5.2.6), although these beta-lactamases have no observable D-Ala-D-Ala carboxypeptidase activity. With the objective of recruiting such activity into a beta-lactamase background, we have prepared a chimeric protein by inserting a 28-amino...

Functional assay limitations are an emerging issue in characterizing human pluripotent stem cells (PSCs). With rodent PSCs, chimera formation using pre-implantation embryos is the gold-standard assay of pluripotency (competence of progeny to differentiate into all three germ layers). In human PSCs (hPSCs), however, this can only be monitored via teratoma formation or in vitro differentiation, a...