PURPOSE To investigate the presence and role of a recently cloned cysteine protease (cathepsin S) in the digestion of rod outer segments (ROS) by cultured retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells. METHODS RPE cell cultures were established from eye bank donor eyes. Total RNA was extracted from freshly harvested cultures, and after reverse transcription, the cDNA was subjected to polymerase chai...

Expression of the adenovirus E1A oncogene stimulates both cell proliferation and p53-dependent apoptosis in rodent cells. p53 implements apoptosis in all or in part through transcriptional activation of bax, the product of which promotes cell death. The adenovirus E1B 19K product is homologous in sequence and in function to Bcl-2, both of which bind to and inhibit the activity of Bax and thereb...

Proteases perform important roles in multiple biological and pathological processes. The availability of the rat genome sequence has facilitated the analysis of the complete protease repertoire or degradome of this model organism. The rat degradome consists of at least 626 proteases and homologs, which are distributed into 24 aspartic, 160 cysteine, 192 metallo, 221 serine, and 29 threonine pro...

Despite its worldwide economic importance for food (oil, meal) and non-food (green energy and chemistry) uses, oilseed rape has a low nitrogen (N) use efficiency (NUE), mainly due to the low N remobilization efficiency (NRE) observed during the vegetative phase when sequential leaf senescence occurs. Assuming that improvement of NRE is the main lever for NUE optimization, unravelling the cellul...

Vinyl sulfone (VS)–agarose beads were used to develop a new strategy coimmobilize enzymes with very different stabilities, enabling the reuse of most stable immobilized enzyme. Two model combi-biocatalysts prepared. First, trypsin and chymotrypsin multipoint covalently coimmobilized on VS–agarose, support was blocked ethylenediamine, then β-galactosidase from Aspergillus oryzae via anion exchan...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the most common progressive neurodegenerative diseases that represents about 60-80 % total cases dementia all over world. Beta secretase (BACE1) a membrane-anchored aspartic protease which cleaves peptide bond between Met671-Asp672 APP (amyloid precursor protein) where its activity rate limiting step producing amyloid β, primary neuropathological hallmark Alzh...

Antimicrobial proteins (peptides) are known to play important roles in the innate host defense mechanisms of most living organisms, including plants, insects, amphibians and mammals. They are also known to possess potent antibiotic activity against bacteria, fungi, and even certain viruses. Recently, the rapid emergence of microbial pathogens that are resistant to currently available antibiotic...