The activation of heteromeric and homomeric nicotinic acetylcholine receptors was studied in Xenopus laevis oocytes to identify key structures of putative agonist molecules associated with the selective activation of homomeric alpha7 receptors. We observed that selectivity between alpha7 and alpha4beta2 was more readily obtained than selectivity between alpha7 and alpha3beta4. Based on structur...

Enhancer trapping is a useful tool in isolation of novel genes and functional characterization of promoters directing tissue-specific expression in trees. Using an enhancer trap approach we isolated a novel gene ET304 from Populus (Populus: aspens and cottonwoods). Both ET304 enhancer trap line and putative ET304 promoter fused to a GUS reporter gene conferred strongly root-predominant expressi...

In this paper, we observed the co-localization of UBIAD1 and Ds Red-ER (an ER marker) in bladder carcinoma cell line T24 and human embryonic kidney cell line HEK293T. UBIAD1 accumulated on the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in both T24 and HEK293T cell lines. Site-directed mutagenesis defined a LAY motif, positioned on 71-73 amino acids of the UBIAD1 N-terminus, as the ER retention signal of UBIAD1...

Phage display is a resourceful tool to, in an unbiased manner, discover and characterize functional protein-protein interactions, create vaccines, and engineer peptides, antibodies, and other proteins as targeted diagnostic and/or therapeutic agents. Recently, our group has developed a new class of internalizing phage (iPhage) for ligand-directed targeting of organelles and to identify molecula...

Site-directed spin labeling with continuous wave electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy was utilized to characterize dynamic features of the kink-turn motif formed through a leader-linker interaction in the Vibrio cholerae glycine riboswitch. Efficient incorporation of spin-labels into select sites within the phosphate backbone of the leader-linker region proceeded via splinted liga...

objective(s): the purpose of this study was to conduct a meta-analysis on human micrornas (mirnas) expression data of endometriosis tissue profiles versus those of normal controls and to identify novel putative diagnostic markers. materials andmethods: pubmed, embase, web of science, ovid medline were used to search for endometriosis mirna expression profiling studies of endometriosis. the mirn...

Fluorescence anisotropy (FA) is a homogeneous, ratiometric, and real-time analytical technology. By selective labeling of a guanine (G)-quadruplex motif with tetramethylrhodamine (TMR), here, it is established that a large reduction in FA response can be specifically associated with the unfolding → folding transition of G-quadruplex structures. On the basis of fluorescence intensity, polarizati...

A new program (Multiple Motif Scanning) was developed to scan the Saccharomyces cerevisiae proteome for Class I S-adenosylmethionine-dependent methyltransferases. Conserved Motifs I, Post I, II, and III were identified and expanded in known methyltransferases by primary sequence and secondary structural analysis through hidden Markov model profiling of both a yeast reference database and a refe...

There is a lack of effective predictive biomarkers to precisely assign optimal therapy to cancer patients. While most efforts are directed at inferring drug response phenotype based on genotype, there is very focused and useful phenotypic information to be gained from directly perturbing the patient's living cancer cell with the drug(s) in question. To satisfy this unmet need, we developed the ...