The activity of many proteins depends on the phosphoinositide (PI) content of the membrane. E.g., dynamic changes of the concentration of PI(4,5)P2 are cellular signals that regulate ion channels. The susceptibility of a channel to such dynamics depends on its affinity for PI(4,5)P2. Yet, measuring affinities for endogenous PIs has not been possible directly, but has relied largely on the respo...

A common mechanism of immune evasion in pathogenic bacteria and protozoa is antigenic variation, in which genetic or epigenetic changes result in rapid, sequential shifts in a surface-exposed antigen. In this issue of Molecular Microbiology, Dai et al. provide the most complete description to date of the vlp/vsp antigenic variation system of the relapsing fever spirochaete, Borrelia hermsii. Th...

The linearity, precision and repeatability of visible spectrophotometric (VSP) and high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods for analysis of inhibitory activity of angiotensin I-converting enzyme (ACE) were compared by using several inhibitors and Hip-His-Leu (HHL) as substrates. IC50 values (concentration at which ACE activity is inhibited by 50%) of 0.00206±0.00005 μg/mL for capto...

BACKGROUND Ventricular septal perforation (VSP) after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is accompanied by the worsening of rapid hemodynamics, resulting in a poor prognosis. In our department, infarct lesions are preoperatively detected with electrocardiogram (ECG)-synchronized contrast computed tomography, and the scope of approach and exclusion is determined. Furthermore, to effectively preve...

The Ciona intestinalis voltage sensor-containing phosphatase (Ci-VSP) shares high homology with the phosphatidylinositol phosphatase enzyme known as PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homologue deleted on chromosome 10). We have taken advantage of the similarity between these proteins to inquire about the coupling between the voltage sensing and the phosphatase domains in Ci-VSP. Recently, it was sho...

The relapsing fever spirochete, Borrelia hermsii, escapes immune selection by alternating expression of surface lipoprotein alleles. The switch results from a duplicative transposition of one of several surface lipoprotein-encoding nucleotide sequences into the singular expression site. These nucleotide sequences constitute a large gene family whose diversity originated, in some cases, before t...

Our paper deals with the question how remote e-voting can be put into practice in a secure and at the same time feasible way. We show that outsourcing the technical implementation of electronic elections to a Voting Service Provider (VSP) is one solution to this problem. Our concept can help election hosts to easily conduct electronic elections without having to take care of the necessary secur...

This study describes the time-course of the accumulation of total soluble proteins (TSPs) and vegetative storage proteins (VSPs) and of the transcripts of cold-inducible (CI) and VSP-encoding genes in taproots of two alfalfa cultivars (AC Caribou and Europe) during their acclimation to natural autumn hardening and overwintering conditions in eastern Canada. The impact of a defoliation in Septem...

Current remote e-voting schemes aim at a number of security objectives. However, this is not enough for providing secure online elections in practice. Beyond a secure e-voting protocol, there are many organizational and technical security requirements that have to be satisfied by the operational environment in which the scheme is implemented. We have investigated four state-of-the-art e-voting ...

A new first break picking for three-component (3C) vertical seismic profiling (VSP) data is proposed to improve the estimation accuracy of first arrivals, which adopts gesture detection calibration and polarization analysis based on the eigenvalue of the covariance matrix. This study aims at addressing the problem that calibration is required for VSP data using the azimuth and dip angle of geop...