A region of the rat FAS (fatty acid synthase) promoter has been defined as being responsible for RA (retinoic acid) responsiveness. The defined promoter region is devoid of canonical RA-response elements but contains cis-elements binding generalized and specific transcription factors that mediate the dietary response of FAS. Our results are consistent with SREBP-1c (sterol-regulatory-element-bi...

Promoter strength, or activity, is important in genetic engineering and synthetic biology. A constitutive promoter with a certain strength for one given RNA can often be reused for other RNAs. Therefore, the strength of one promoter is mainly determined by its nucleotide sequence. One of the main difficulties in genetic engineering and synthetic biology is how to control the expression of a cer...

CYP3A4 probably has the broadest catalytic activity of any cytochrome P450. It is a crucial task to test new drug candidates in a reliable system for their ability to induce expression of this enzyme. Firstly, a total of 300 bp core distal enhancer of CYP3A4 XREM region (-7972/-7673) were amplified from human genomic DNA. The PCR product was then ligated into a human secretory alkaline phosphat...

Platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) is a heterodimeric glycoprotein consisting of A and B chains. A functional promoter had been identified in the 5' flanking region of the human PDGF-A chain gene. We found that the PDGF-A chain promoter region possesses the potential for bidirectional activity. This bidirectional promoter activity is influenced by the 5'-untranslated region (5'-UTR) and seru...

The human intestinal type IIb Na+-P(i) cotransporter (hNaPi-IIb) gene promoter lacks a TATA box and has a high GC content in the 5'-flanking region. To understand the mechanism of hNaPi-IIb gene transcription, the current study was performed to characterize the minimal promoter region and transcriptional factor(s) necessary to activate gene expression in human intestinal cells (Caco-2). With th...

Gastric Cancer (GC) is the second most common cancer in the world and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Methylation of promoter CpG islands (CGIs) belonging to tumor suppressor genes causes transcriptional silencing of their corresponding genes leading to carcinogenesis and other disorders. Adenomatous Polyposis Coli (APC) a tumor suppressor gene is inactivated by methylation of prom...

Heterogeneity at the Helicobacter pylori cagA gene promoter region has been linked to variation in CagA expression and gastric histopathology. Here, we characterized the cagA promoter and expression in 46 H. pylori strains from Portugal. Our results confirm the relationship between cagA promoter region variation and protein expression originally observed in strains from Colombia. We observed th...

Background & Objective: Brucellosis is one of the most prevalent bacterial zoonotic diseases which afflicts both humans and animals. Genetic factors play an important role in susceptibility to brucellosis. One of these factors is interferon-gamma (IFN-g), which is vital in the defense mechanism against infectious diseases such as brucellosis. The purpose of this study was to ev...

background more than two billion people have been exposed to hepatitis b virus (hbv) worldwide. furthermore, four hundred million of them are infected with chronic hbv infection. the predominant mutation of the precore region involves a g to a change at nucleotide1896, which creates a premature stop codon at codon 28. two mutations of a1762t and g1764a are reported as the most prevalent mutatio...