To induce toxicity, cholera toxin (CT) must first bind ganglioside G(M1) at the plasma membrane, enter the cell by endocytosis, and then traffic retrograde into the endoplasmic reticulum. We recently proposed that G(M1) provides the sorting motif necessary for retrograde trafficking into the biosynthetic/secretory pathway of host cells, and that such trafficking depends on association with lipi...

Strong intercellular adhesion is critical for tissues that experience mechanical stress, such as the skin and heart. Desmosomes provide adhesive strength to tissues by anchoring desmosomal cadherins of neighboring cells to the intermediate filament cytoskeleton. Alterations in assembly and disassembly compromise desmosome function and may contribute to human diseases, such as the autoimmune ski...

In this paper, we have analyzed the behavior of antibody cross-linked raft-associated proteins on the surface of MDCK cells. We observed that cross-linking of membrane proteins gave different results depending on whether cross-linking occurred on the apical or basolateral plasma membrane. Whereas antibody cross-linking induced the formation of large clusters on the basolateral membrane, resembl...

In T cells, the lipid raft-associated Lck is strongly tyrosine phosphorylated and has reduced enzymic activity in contrast with the detergent-soluble pool, which has substantial activity. Lck tagged at the C-terminus (Lck/V5-His) was efficiently captured by epitope-specific reagents from the detergent-soluble fraction but not from lipid rafts. Binding was restored following urea denaturation, s...

Blockchain-based IoT systems can manage devices and achieve a high level of data integrity, security, provenance. However, incorporating existing consensus protocols in many limits scalability leads to computational cost latency. In addition, location-centric characteristics applications paired with limited storage computing power bring about more limitations, primarily due the location-agnosti...

Membrane rafts are transient and unstable membrane microdomains that are enriched in sphingolipids, cholesterol, and specific proteins. They are involved in intracellular trafficking, signal transduction, pathogen entry, and attachment of various ligands. Increasing experimental evidence on the crucial biological roles of membrane rafts under normal and pathological conditions require new techn...

Reversible modifications of reversible addition–fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT)-polymerization derived end groups are usually limited to reductive degradable disulfide conjugates. However, self-immolative linkers can promote ligation and traceless release primary secondary amines as well alcohols via carbonates or carbamates in ?-position disulfides. In this study, these two strategies comb...

This paper describes how an existing application may be integrated into the RaFT system to provide enhanced fault-tolerance. Some fault-tolerance is provided transparently using hardware voting, but the RaFT system is in principle able to do more by exploiting reconfiguration. The example application is a simplified railway signalling system and a pipeline of transputers has been selected as th...

Approaches to the synthesis of block copolymers containing organic semiconductor segments (polythiophene, perylene diimide) by RAFT polymerization have been explored. A method involving transformation of a vinyl derivative to a macro-RAFT agent provides for the synthesis of block copolymers which are joined by a short non-hydrolysable linkage.