Estrogen receptor α (ERα), as a ligand-dependent transcription factor, mediates 17β-estradiol (E2) effects. ERα is a modular protein containing a DNA binding domain (DBD) and transcription activation domains (AD) located at the amino- and carboxyl-termini. The interaction of the E2-activated ERα dimer with estrogen response elements (EREs) of genes constitutes the initial step in the ERE-depend...

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) mediates angiogenic activity in a variety of estrogen target tissues. To determine whether estrogen has a direct transcriptional effect on VEGF gene expression, we developed a model system by transiently transfecting human VEGF promoter-luciferase reporter constructs into primary human endometrial cells and into Ishikawa cells, derived from a well-diffe...

BACKGROUND/AIMS In vitro studies have shown that band-3 function is mainly regulated by its phosphorylation status. The main purpose of the study was to investigate whether band-3 phosphorylation status interferes with an exhaustive running exercise-related dysfunction of RBC deformability. METHODS Rats were divided into sedentary control (C) and exercise test (ET) groups. The ET group was di...

Xenoestrogens could be implicated in the decrease of male fertility and in the increased incidence of testicular and breast cancers in humans. To predict their deleterious effects, various in vivo or in vitro tests have been proposed to assay the xenoestrogenic activity. We have designed an assay for the detection of xenoestrogens based on a novel estrogen responsive unit formed by two overlapp...

Extended regular expressions (ERE) define regular languages using union, concatenation, repetition, intersection, and complementation operators. The fact ERE allow intersection and complementation makes them exponentially more succinct than regular expressions. The membership problem for extended regular expressions is to decide, given an expression r and a word w, whether w belongs to the lang...

INTRODUCTION To determine and evaluate the effective radiation exposure during a one year follow-up of urolithiasis patients following the SWL (extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy) treatment. MATERIAL AND METHODS Total Effective Radiation Exposure (ERE) doses for each of the 129 patients: 44 kidney stone patients, 41 ureter stone patients, and 44 multiple stone location patients were calcul...

In the classical signaling pathway, the estrogen receptor (ER) binds directly to estrogen response elements (EREs) to regulate gene transcription. To test the hypothesis that the nonclassical pathway involves ER interactions with other proteins rather than direct binding to DNA, mutations were introduced into the DNA binding domain (DBD) of the mouse ERalpha. The effects of these DBD mutations ...

We present initial results from the first optical spectroscopic survey of high latitude Galactic cirrus clouds. The observed shape of the cirrus spectrum does not agree with that of scattered ambient Galactic starlight. This mismatch can be explained by the presence of Extended Red Emission (ERE) in the diffuse interstellar medium, as found in many other astronomical objects, probably caused by...

We have previously shown that the estrogen responsiveness of the human lactoferrin gene in a transient transfection system is mediated through an imperfect estrogen response element (ERE) and a steroidogenic factor 1 binding element (SFRE) 26 bp upstream from ERE. Reporter constructs containing SFRE and ERE respond to estrogen stimulation in a dose-dependent manner, whereas mutations at either ...

We recently demonstrated that members of the c-ets proto-oncogene family, Ets1 and Ets2, are sequence-specific transcriptional activators of the human T-lymphotropic virus type I (HTLV-I) long terminal repeat (LTR). We now report that the HTLV-I LTR contains two distinct Ets1-responsive regions, ERR-1 and ERR-2. Expression of Ets1 with reporter plasmids containing ERR-1 or ERR-2 upstream of a b...