The O-mannosyltransferase Pmt4 has emerged as crucial for fungal virulence in the animal pathogens Candida albicans or Cryptococcus neoformans as well as in the phytopathogenic fungus Ustilago maydis. Pmt4 O-mannosylates specific target proteins at the Endoplasmic Reticulum. Therefore a deficient O-mannosylation of these target proteins must be responsible for the loss of pathogenicity in pmt4 ...

Genetic interventions that accelerate or retard aging in mice are crucial in advancing our knowledge over mammalian aging. Yet determining if a given intervention affects the aging process is not straightforward since, for instance, many disease-causing mutations may decrease life span without affecting aging. In this work, we employed the Gompertz model to determine whether several published i...

Gammaretrovirus receptors have been suggested to contain the necessary determinants to mediate virus binding and entry. Here, we show that murine NIH 3T3 and baby hamster kidney (BHK) cells overexpressing receptors for subgroup A, B, and C feline leukemia viruses (FeLVs) are weakly susceptible (10(1) to 10(2) CFU/ml) to FeLV pseudotype viruses containing murine leukemia virus (MLV) core (Gag-Po...

The pituitary gland consists of two major parts: the neurohypophysis, which is of neural origin; and the adenohypophysis, which is of non-neural ectodermal origin. Development of the adenohypophysis is governed by signaling proteins from the infundibulum, a ventral structure of the diencephalon that gives rise to the neurohypophysis. In mouse, the fibroblast growth factors Fgf8, Fgf10 and Fgf18...

lentinan a polysaccharide from medicinal mushroom i.e lentinus, has been known to have anticancer properties. telomerase activity is not observed in normal healthy cells, whereas in cancerous cells telomerase expression is high. telomerase represents a promising cancer therapeutic target. we investigated the inhibitory effect of lentinan on telomerase reverse transcriptase gene (htert) which is...

lentiviral vectors are promising gene delivery tools capable of transducing a variety of dividing and non-dividing cells, including pluripotent stem cells which are refractory for transduction by murine retroviruses. although there is a growing debate on the safety of lentiviral vectors for gene transfer, in particular for those derived from human immunodeficiency viruses, type one (hiv-1) and ...