Photosystem II is a reaction center protein complex located in photosynthetic membranes of plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. Using light energy, photosystem II catalyzes the oxidation of water and the reduction of plastoquinone, resulting in the release of molecular oxygen. A key component of photosystem II is cytochrome b559, a membrane-embedded heme protein with an unknown function. The cytoc...

Type I IFN (IFN-alphabeta), which is produced rapidly in response to infection, plays a key role in innate immunity and also acts as a stimulus for the adaptive immune response. We have investigated how IFN-alphabeta induces cross-priming, comparing CD8+ T cell responses generated against soluble protein Ags in the presence or absence of IFN-alphabeta. Injection of IFN-alpha was found to prolon...

Previously, we have reported that neutralization of surface lymphotoxin (LT-alphabeta) in mice which expressed an LT-beta receptor-Fc fusion protein, driven by the cytomegalovirus promoter, resulted in an array of anatomic abnormalities. We now report that mice which express a tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptor p60-Fc fusion protein (which neutralizes TNF and soluble LT-alpha3 activity) devel...

Vanilloid (VR1) and purinergic (P2X) receptors are found in cranial afferent neurons in nodose ganglia and their central terminations within the solitary tract nucleus (NTS), but little is known about their function. We mechanically dissociated dorsomedial NTS neurons to preserve attached native synapses and tested for VR1 and P2X function primarily in spindle-shaped neurons resembling intact s...

The editing reactions catalyzed by aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases are critical for the faithful protein synthesis by correcting misactivated amino acids and misaminoacylated tRNAs. We report that the isolated editing domain of leucyl-tRNA synthetase from the deep-rooted bacterium Aquifex aeolicus (alphabeta-LeuRS) catalyzes the hydrolytic editing of both mischarged tRNA(Leu) and minihelix(Leu). Wit...

The rod photoreceptor phosphodiesterase (PDE) is unique among all known vertebrate PDE families for several reasons. It is a catalytic heterodimer (alphabeta); it is directly activated by a G-protein, transducin; and its active sites are regulated by inhibitory gamma subunits. Rod PDE binds cGMP at two noncatalytic sites on the alphabeta dimer, but their function is unclear. We show that transd...

Epithelial tissues in which carcinomas develop often contain systemically derived T cell receptor (TCR)alphabeta+ cells and resident intraepithelial lymphocytes that are commonly enriched in TCRgammadelta+ cells. Recent studies have demonstrated that gammadelta cells protect the host against chemically induced cutaneous malignancy, but the role of alphabeta T cells has been enigmatic, with both...

Antigen recognition by T lymphocytes is mediated by cell-surface glycoproteins known as T-cell antigen receptors (TCRs). These are composed of alpha and beta, or gamma and delta, polypeptide chains with variable (V) and constant (C) regions. In contrast to alphabeta TCRs, which recognize antigen only as peptide fragments bound to molecules of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), gammadel...

From the notion of a stochastic Hamiltonian and the flows that they generate, we present an account of the theory of stochastic derivations over both classical and quantum algebras and demonstrate the natural way to add stochastic derivations. Our discussion on quantum stochastic processes emphasizes the origin of the Itô correction to the Leibniz rule in terms of normal ordering of white noise...