Persistent/latent viral infections of insect cells are a prominent though poorly understood phenomenon. In this study, the long-term association between the Hz-1 virus and insect host cells, conventionally referred to as persistent viral infection, is described. With the aid of a newly developed fluorescent cell-labeling system, we found that productive viral replication occurs by spontaneous v...

Conclusions Use of the drug tunicamycin has greatly facilitated study of many different aspects of immunoglobulin biosynthesis. The most striking conclusion is that blocking glycosylation does not prevent synthesis of immunoglobulin heavy chains either directly or by feedback; non-glycosylated heavy chains are able to assemble into immunoglobulin molecules capable of being secreted. Since glyco...

IE1 of Autographa californica multicapsid nuclear polyhedrosis virus acts as a transactivator of several viral promoters in insect cells. Transient expression assays indicate that IE1 is involved in the activation of the early promoter he65 in both insect TN-368 and mammalian BHK-21 cell lines. IE1 activation of the he65 promoter was compared with IE1 activation of the early 39K promoter. In co...

Plasma membranes from insect midgut cells are separated into apical and basolateral domains. The apical domain is usually modified into microvilli with a molecular structure similar to other animals. Nevertheless, the microvillar structure should differ in some insects to permit the traffic inside them of secretory vesicles that may budd laterally or pinch-off from the tips of microvilli. Other...

A vitamin K-dependent carboxylase has recently been purified from bovine liver microsomes and candidate cDNA clones have been isolated. Definitive identification of the carboxylase remains circumstantial since expression of candidate carboxylase cDNAs in mammalian cells is confounded by the presence of endogenous carboxylase activity. To overcome this problem, a recombinant strain of baculoviru...

The objective of this study was to determine the effects of proline hydroxylation in the collagen-like domain and Asn(187)-linked glycosylation in the globular domain on the molecular and functional properties of human surfactant protein A1 (SP-A1). To address this issue, SP-A1 was in vitro expressed in insect and mammalian cells. Insect cells lack prolyl 4-hydroxylase activity. A glycosylation...

Oenocytes are insect cells responsible for lipid processing and detoxification. Of ectodermic origin, they are found in close association with the insect epidermis, or fat body cells, or both depending on the insect species and developmental stage. They are easily distinguishable either by staining or by their ability to form cell clusters lined by a basal lamina, which makes it possible to iso...

The extracellular portion (amino acids 1 to 844) of the equine herpesvirus type 1 (EHV-1) glycoprotein gp14, the homologue of gB of herpes simplex virus, was expressed in Escherichia coli and in insect cells using a recombinant baculovirus. Immunoblot analysis revealed that the recombinant E. coli expressed a fusion protein of M(r) 135K which was composed of the truncated gp14 and the maltose-b...

Insect cells are widely used for recombinant glycoprotein production, but they cannot provide the glycosylation patterns required for some biotechnological applications. This problem has been addressed by genetically engineering insect cells to express mammalian genes encoding various glycoprotein glycan processing functions. However, for various reasons, the impact of a mammalian cytosine-5'-m...