BACKGROUND Podocyte foot process effacement accompanied by actin cytoskeleton rearrangements is a cardinal feature of many progressive human proteinuric diseases. RESULTS By microarray profiling of mouse glomerulus, SCHIP1 emerged as one of the most highly enriched transcripts. We detected Schip1 protein in the kidney glomerulus, specifically in podocytes foot processes. Functionally, Schip1 ...

A significant part of drug discovery in the last forty years has been focussed on agents to prevent or treat cancer. This is not surprising because, in most developed countries and, to an increasing extent, in developing countries, cancer is amongst the three most common causes of death and morbidity. Treatments for cancer may involve surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy and often a combinati...

Szent-Gyorgyi and Prior (1966) provided evidence for the exchange of actin-bound ADP during superprecipitation of actomyosin and myofibrils. Tentative experimental support was given by Cheesman and Whitehead (1968) to the suggestion that the exchange also occurred in vivo as a result of muscular contraction. Further experiments with improved techniques have confirmed these findings. 14 Injectio...

During cell division all chromosomes must be segregated accurately to each daughter cell. Errors in this process give rise to aneuploidy, which leads to birth defects and is implicated in cancer progression. The spindle checkpoint is a surveillance mechanism that ensures high fidelity of chromosome segregation by inhibiting anaphase until all kinetochores have established bipolar attachments to...

Low Molecular Weight Heparins (LMWH) are complex anticoagulant drugs that mainly inhibit the blood coagulation cascade through indirect interaction with antithrombin. While inhibition of the factor Xa is well described, little is known about the polysaccharide structure inhibiting thrombin. In fact, a minimal chain length of 18 saccharides units, including an antithrombin (AT) binding pentasacc...

Axons are the cable-like protrusions of neurons which wire up the nervous system. Polar bundles of microtubules (MTs) constitute their structural backbones and are highways for life-sustaining transport between proximal cell bodies and distal synapses. Any morphogenetic changes of axons during development, plastic rearrangement, regeneration or degeneration depend on dynamic changes of these MT...

In fission yeast centromeres cluster at the nuclear envelope in a region underlying the spindle pole body during interphase, an arrangement known as a Rabl configuration. We have identified a strain in which one pair of sister kinetochores is unclustered from the others and binds the nuclear envelope at a point distal to the spindle pole body. We show that during mitosis unclustered kinetochore...

The Deinococcus radiodurans genome encodes homologues of divisome proteins including FtsZ and FtsA. FtsZ of this bacterium (Dr-FtsZ) has been recently characterized. In this paper, we study FtsA of D. radiodurans (Dr-FtsA) and its involvement in regulation of FtsZ function. Recombinant Dr-FtsA showed neither ATPase nor GTPase activity and its polymerization was ATP dependent. Interestingly, we ...

This study explored the potential of melamine, as nitrogenating source for cationization pulverized quebracho and spruce tannins. The influence modification conditions on properties coagulants was studied by varying formaldehyde melamine ratios with different activation times temperatures. Based considerations charge density shelf life, most viable modifications were established synthesized a 1...

Microtubules within meiotic and mitotic spindles continually move towards spindle poles in a process termed poleward flux, which is essential for spindle integrity and faithful chromosome segregation. Kinesin 5 is a longstanding candidate for a molecular motor that might drive poleward flux, and has been shown to drive flux and to be necessary for spindle bipolarity in Xenopus egg extracts. How...