B-cell superantigens (Sags) bind to conserved sites of the VH or VL regions of immunoglobulin molecules outside their complementarity-determining regions causing the apoptosis of normal cognate B cells. No attempts to investigate whether B-cell Sags are able to induce the apoptosis of cognate malignant B cells were reported. In the present study we show that protein L (PpL), secreted by Finegol...

Bax, a death-promoting member of the Bcl-2 family of proteins, triggered cell death when expressed in plants from a tobacco mosaic virus vector. Analysis of Bax deletion mutants demonstrated a requirement for the BH1 and BH3 domains in promoting rapid cell death, whereas deletion of the carboxyl-terminal transmembrane domain completely abolished the lethality of Bax in plants. The phenotype of ...

Apoptosis is a potent immune barrier against viral infection, and many viruses, including poxviruses, encode proteins to overcome this defense. Interestingly, the avipoxviruses, which include fowlpox and canarypox virus, are the only poxviruses known to encode proteins with obvious Bcl-2 sequence homology. We previously characterized the fowlpox virus protein FPV039 as a Bcl-2-like antiapoptoti...

  Background and Objective: As apoptotic cell death is extremely involved in physiological development and many pathological situations such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, the understanding of its molecular machinery can be useful in designing new therapeutic strategies. The present study investigated the temporal expression of the proapoptotic protein Bax in adult spinal motoneuron...