Macroautophagy (generally referred to as autophagy) mediates the bulk degradation of cytoplasmic contents, including proteins and organelles, in lysosomes. Rapamycin, a lipophilic, macrolide antibiotic, induces autophagy by inactivating the protein mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR). We previously showed that rapamycin protects against mutant huntingtin-induced neurodegeneration in cell, fly ...

The kinetics of a-helix formation in polyalanine and polyglycine eicosamers (20-mers) were examined using torsional-coordinate molecular dynamics (MD). Of one hundred fifty-five MD experiments on extended (Ala)20 carried out for 0.5 ns each, 129 (83%) formed a persistent a-helix. In contrast, the extended state of (Gly)20 only formed a righthanded a-helix in two of the 20 MD experiments (10%), ...

Symptomatic West syndrome has heterogeneous backgrounds. Recently, two novel genes, ARX and CDKL5, have been found to be responsible for cryptogenic West syndrome or infantile spasms. Both are located in the human chromosome Xp22 region and are mainly expressed and play roles in fetal brain. Moreover, several genes responsible for brain malformations including lissencephaly, which is frequently...

Unconventional superconductivity was realized in systems comprising a monolayer of magnetic adatoms adsorbed on conventional superconductors, forming Shiba-bands. Another approach to induce unconventional and 2D Shiba-bands recently introduced, namely, by adsorbing chiral molecules (ChMs) which act similar way impurities as verified conductance spectroscopy. However, the fundamental effect ChMs...