herbal medicine can be a valuable source of assistance for traditional medicine. there are a number of herbs that can be used in conjunction with modern medicine. herbs can also be taken to aid recovery from serious diseases. although one should never aim to treat diseases such as cardiovascular disease solely with herbal medicine, the value of herbs used in tandem with modern medicine cannot b...

A recent study visualizes nascent RNAs in live Drosophila embryos to establish a connection between enhancer strength and the frequency of transcriptional bursts. Interestingly, one enhancer can simultaneously activate two core promoters, challenging models of enhancer-core-promoter communication via direct protein-protein contacts.

Heme oxygenase 1 (HO-1), a stress response protein, is highly induced in response to various agents causing oxidative stress including ultraviolet irradiation, sodium arsenite, hyperoxia, and glutathione depletors. We recently characterized the induction of HO-1 gene expression by nitric oxide (NO) and postulated that the addition of an antioxidant, such as pyrrolidine dithiocarbamate (PDTC), w...

The avian leukosis virus (ALV) long terminal repeat (LTR) contains a compact transcription enhancer that is active in many cell types. A major feature of the enhancer is multiple CCAAT/enhancer element motifs that could be important for the strong transcriptional activity of this unit. The contributions of the three CCAAT/enhancer elements to LTR function were examined in B cells, as this cell ...

The 5'-flanking sequence of the human prothrombin gene was isolated by screening a human liver phage library with a human prothrombin cDNA as a hybridization probe. A phage was identified that contained 3 kilobase pairs of DNA upstream of the initiator methionine codon. Primer extension studies showed that the major transcription initiation sites were located 23 and 36 base pairs upstream of th...