Overexpression of cathepsin D (CD), a ubiquitous lysosomal protease, is closely associated with a poor clinical outcome for patients with breast cancer. Estrogen greatly induces transcription of the CD gene in estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer cells. In this report, we transiently introduced a human CD promoter/chloramphenicol acetyltransferase reporter gene into human MCF-7 breast ...

Bifunctional cross-linking reagents were used to probe the protein environment in the ER membrane of the signal sequence receptor (SSR), a 24-kD integral membrane glycoprotein (Wiedmann, M., T. V. Kurzchalia, E. Hartmann, and T. A. Rapoport. 1987. Nature [Lond.]. 328:830-833). The proximity of several polypeptides was demonstrated. A 22-kD glycoprotein was identified tightly bound to the 34-kD ...

Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress causes neuronal dysfunction followed by cell death and is recognized as a feature of many neurodegenerative diseases. Using a phenotypic screen, we recently identified benzodiazepinone derivatives that reduce ER stress-mediated apoptosis in a rat neuronal progenitor cell line (CSM14.1). Herein we describe how structure-activity relationship (SAR) studies around...

PURPOSE To investigate the impact of Pro370Leu mutant myocilin on endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress response and mitochondria function in human trabecular meshwork (HTM) cells. METHODS HTM cells were transfected with wild-type Pro370Leu mutant myocilin or pcDNA3.1 (+) expression plasmids. The effect of the mutant myocilin on ER stress response was semiquantitatively evaluated by determining t...

Secretory granules (SGs) sequester significant calcium. Understanding roles for this calcium and potential mechanisms of release is hampered by the difficulty of measuring SG calcium directly in living cells. We adapted the Förster resonance energy transfer-based D1-endoplasmic reticulum (ER) probe to develop a unique probe (D1-SG) to measure calcium and pH in secretory granules. It significant...

BACKGROUND Endoscopic management of Barrett's esophagus (BE) depends on the histological stage of BE and includes the following: follow up, endotherapy with thermal ablation, and piecemeal or monobloc endoscopic resection (ER). We know that biopsies are unreliable in 20-75% of cases. The aim of our study was to evaluate the efficiency of probe confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) in the diagnos...

BACKGROUND There is an increasing need to characterize biological processes for early prediction and monitoring of response to endocrine therapy in breast cancer using multiple positron emission tomography (PET) imaging probes. However, use of more than two PET tracers in a single clinical trial is quite challenging. In this study we carried out a longitudinal investigation of 18F-FES, 18F-FDG,...

Background. It is unclear whether the clinical use of tibial rotation to measure the strength of the medial hamstrings and lateral hamstrings in isolation is based on sound scientific evidence or is simply based on anatomical features. Objectives. To verify the appropriateness of tibial rotation for isolation of the medial hamstrings and lateral hamstrings, the participants performed neutral r...

The main goal of this paper is to introduce and study a new class of function via the notions of $e$-$theta$-open sets and $e$-$theta$-closure operator which are defined by Özkoç and Aslım [10] called weakly $eR$-open functions and $e$-$theta$-open functions. Moreover, we investigate not only some of their basic properties but also their relationships with other types of already existing topolo...