The cytokine thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) functions as a regulator of bone marrow B-cell development and a key initiator of allergic inflammation. In the current study, we show that mature B cells, derived from transgenic mice with systemically elevated levels of TSLP (K5-TSLP mice), exhibit markedly enhanced mitogenic responses in vitro and that this enhanced responsiveness leads to pol...

Heparosan is an acidic polysaccharide natural product, which serves as the critical precursor in heparin biosynthesis and in the chemoenzymatic synthesis of bioengineered heparin. Heparosan is also the capsular polysaccharide of Escherichia coli K5 strain. The current study was focused on the examination of the fermentation of E. coli K5 with the goal of producing heparosan in high yield and vo...

We report the 5.101-Mbp high-quality draft assembly of the Escherichia coli strain ATCC 23506 (serovar O10:K5:H4, also known as NCDC Bi 8337-41) genome. This uropathogenic strain, commonly referred to as E. coli K5, produces N-acetyl heparosan, a glycosaminoglycan-like capsular polysaccharide and precursor to the anticoagulant pharmaceutical heparin. Metabolic reconstruction of this genome will...

Thomassen conjectured [8] that every 4-connected line graph is hamiltonian. An hourglass is a graph isomorphic to K5−E(C), where C is a cycle of length 4 in K5. In [2], it is shown that every 4-connected line graph without an induced subgraph isomorphic to the hourglass is hamiltonian connected. In this note, we prove that every 3-connected, essentially 4-connected hourglass-free line graph is ...

The blistering skin disorder epidermolysis bullosa simplex (EBS) results from dominant mutations in keratin 5 (K5) or keratin 14 (K14) genes, encoding the intermediate filament (IF) network of basal epidermal keratinocytes. The mechanisms governing keratin network formation and collapse due to EBS mutations remain incompletely understood. Drosophila lacks cytoplasmic IFs, providing a 'null' env...

TGFβ1 was initially identified as a potent chemotactic cytokine to initiate inflammation, but the autoimmune phenotype seen in TGFβ1 knockout mice reversed the dogma of TGFβ1 being a pro-inflammatory cytokine to predominantly an immune suppressor. The discovery of the role of TGFβ1 in Th17 cell activation once again revealed the pro-inflammatory effect of TGFβ1. We developed K5.TGFβ1 mice with ...

It has been suggested recently that presynaptic kainate receptors (KARs) are involved in short-term and long-term synaptic plasticity at hippocampal mossy fiber synapses. Using genetic deletion and pharmacology, we here assess the role of GLU(K5) and GLU(K6) in synaptic plasticity at hippocampal mossy fiber synapses. We found that the kainate-induced facilitation was completely abolished in the...

Graph isomorphism is an important and widely studied computational problem with a yet unsettled complexity. However, the exact complexity is known for isomorphism of various classes of graphs. Recently, [8] proved that planar isomorphism is complete for log-space. We extend this result further to the classes of graphs which exclude K3,3 or K5 as a minor, and give a log-space algorithm. Our algo...

Catlin and Jaeger proved that the cycle matroid of a 4-edge-connected graph has a spanning cycle. This result can not be generalized to regular matroids as there exist infinitely many connected cographic matroids, each of which contains a M(K5) minor and has arbitrarily large cogirth, that do not have spanning cycles. In this paper, we proved that if a connected regular matroid without aM(K5)-m...