The physiological role of the subtilisin/kexin-like proprotein convertases (PCs) in rodents has been examined through the use of knockout mice. This review will summarize the major in vivo defects that result from the disruption of the expression of their genes. This includes abnormal embryonic development, hormonal disorder, infertility, and/or modified lipid/sterol metabolism. Members of the ...

Spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) can spontaneously dedifferentiate into embryonic stem cell (ESC)-like cells, which are designated as multipotent SSCs (mSSCs), without ectopic expression of reprogramming factors. Interestingly, SSCs express key pluripotency genes such as Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and Myc. Therefore, molecular dissection of mSSC reprogramming may provide clues about novel endogenous repr...

Prohormone processing was discovered 35 years ago with the observation that proinsulin is the precursor of both the A and the B chains of insulin (Steiner, 1969). During the next 15 years, many candidate proteases were proposed and rejected before genetic and biochemical evidence identified specific processing proteases in Saccharomyces cerevisiae that are involved in α-factor biosynthesis ( Ju...

Single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) binding proteins are important in basal metabolic pathways for gene transcription, recombination, DNA repair and replication in all domains of life. Their main cellular role is to stabilize melted duplex DNA and protect genomic DNA from degradation. We have uncovered the molecular function of protein domain family domain of unknown function DUF2128 (PF09901) as a nov...

There are many applications in which it is useful to compute the in­ verse of some program, that is, to find another program such that feeding the output of the original program as input to the new pro­ gram produces the original input. One such application is in program ming by specification: one would like to define a program to compute the square root of a number by the equation (√x) = x rat...

Diese Dissertation wurde selbständig und ohne unerlaubte Hilfe erarbeitet. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to Prof. Dr. Michael Meisterernst for giving me the opportunity to work with him and for guiding me in the field of transcription. I am thankful for his constant support and guidance throughout my work. I am thankful to all the current and former lab members, especially, Ulrike Niehues...

The fourth member of Ca2+-dependent mammalian secretory subtilase, PC4 (proprotein convertase 4), is primarily expressed in testicular germ cell and ovarian macrophage. Its role in sperm fertilization and in early embryonic development has been demonstrated earlier through several studies, including those with PC4 null mice. A number of physiological substrates found in reproductive tissues hav...

planningFig. 1. Abstract Planning and Island Re nementThe rhs of Figure 1 depicts a re nement strategy, called island-re nement,that takes the abstract steps and goals and maps them back to the groundlevel. This island re nement produces island steps at the ground level. In theexample, the step sa, ApplyEquation(abs(2)), is mapped to the island step s5 Schematic means th...

VADEHRA, D. V. (Michigan State University, East Lansing), D. L. WALLACE, AND L. G. HARMON. Comparison of methods of extracting intracellular proteases from bacteria. Appl. Microbiol. 13:1010-1013. 1965.-Five commonly used methods of disintegrating bacterial cells were compared by use of Bacillus subtilis, Pseudomonas putrefaciens, and Streptococcus durans as the test organisms. These methods we...

The problem of linking entities in heterogeneous and decentralized data repositories is the driving force behind the data and knowledge integration effort. In this paper, we describe our probabilistic-logical alignment system CODI (Combinatorial Optimization for Data Integration). The system provides a declarative framework for the alignment of individuals, concepts, and properties of two heter...