Down Syndrome (DS) patients develop characteristic Alzheimer's Disease (AD) neuropathology after their middle age. Prominent neuronal loss has been observed in the cortical regions of AD brains. However, the underlying mechanism leading to this neuronal loss in both DS and AD remains to be elucidated. Calcium overloading and oxidative stress have been implicated in AD pathogenesis. Two major is...

Fluorescent calcium indicator proteins, such as GCaMP3, allow imaging of activity in genetically defined neuronal populations. GCaMP3 can be expressed using various gene delivery methods, such as viral infection or electroporation. However, these methods are invasive and provide inhomogeneous and nonstationary expression. Here, we developed a genetic reporter mouse, Ai38, which expresses GCaMP3...

The plant photoreceptor phytochrome A utilizes three signal transduction pathways, dependent upon calcium and/or cGMP, to activate genes in the light. In this report, we have studied the phytochrome A regulation of a gene that is down-regulated by light, asparagine synthetase (AS1). We show that AS1 is expressed in the dark and repressed in the light. Repression of AS1 in the light is likely co...

Background: Epigenetic modifications, such as methylation can occur in multiple myeloma. SMG1is an important gene involved in cell growth which defect in methylation of its promoter leads to reduction of cell apoptosis and uncontrolled proliferation. In this study, we identified the methylation status of the SMG1 gene promoter in patients with multiple myeloma. Methods: Methylation status of S...

Calcium is essential for normal epidermal differentiation. Data from Northern and nuclear run-on analysis indicate that involucrin gene transcription is induced by 1.2 mM extracellular calcium. A 3.7 Kbp fragment of the involucrin gene, which contains 2.5 Kbp of upstream region, the transcription start site, and the first intron, was sub-cloned into the pGL3-basic luciferase reporter vector and...

Calcium has long been acknowledged as one of the most important signalling components in plants. Many abiotic and biotic stimuli are transduced into a cellular response by temporal and spatial changes in cellular calcium concentration and the calcium-sensitive protein aequorin has been exploited as a genetically encoded calcium indicator for the measurement of calcium in planta. The objective o...

Abstrad Indudion of gene expression in response to calcium ionophores or thapsigargin, which inhibits the calciumATPase responsible for sequestering intracellular calcium, has frequently been attributed to dired stimulatory events subsequent to the elevation of intracellular free calcium. VL3O is a murine gene that is transcriptionally induced in response to a large array of mitogenic and trans...

Activity-dependent changes in synaptic strength, which appear to underlie cortical plasticity, require long-lasting biochemical changes in the postsynaptic neuron. An inductive event common to several forms of synaptic plasticity is an influx of calcium into the postsynaptic cell. Calcium acts as a second messenger to set into motion a cascade of biochemical signaling events that leads to new g...

There are two different co-expression systems including bicistronic; dual-vector or two-promoter to express two different genes simultaneously and also to study protein-protein interactions. Bicistronic system has disadvantages e.g. compared with two-promoter system. In this paper, a simple method based on spliced overlap extension by polymerase chain reaction (SOE-PCR) technique was demonstrat...