BACKGROUND Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are genetic fossils of ancient retroviral integrations that remain in the genome of many organisms. Most loci are rendered non-functional by mutations, but several intact retroviral genes are known in mammalian genomes. Some have been adopted by the host species, while the beneficial roles of others remain unclear. Besides the obvious possible immunogen...

Cell lines expressing foreign genes have been widely used to produce a variety of recombinant proteins. However, generating recombinant protein-expressing cell lines is usually a lengthy process and the resulting protein expression levels are often inconsistent. Here, we describe an efficient method for making stable cell lines expressing any recombinant protein of interest in a controllable an...

Transgenic mice carrying immunoglobulin genes coding for mu heavy chain and kappa light chain have been used to study the mechanisms involved in allelic and isotypic exclusion. We report here that individual cells from transgenic mice carrying a functionally rearranged mu heavy chain gene (capable of generating both membrane and secreted forms of IgM) can rearrange an endogenous mu heavy chain ...

IL-4 promotes the development of Th2 cells and allergic inflammation. In atopic dermatitis lesions, IL-4 decreases the expression of multiple genes associated with innate defense, including genes in the epidermal differentiation complex (EDC) that regulate epidermal barrier function. However, it is not clear whether IL-4 also contributes to homeostatic control of EDC genes. In this report, we d...

The majority of retroviral envelope glycoproteins characterized to date are typical of type I viral fusion proteins, having a receptor binding subunit associated with a fusion subunit. The fusion subunits of lentiviruses and alpha-, beta-, delta- and gammaretroviruses have a very conserved domain organization and conserved features of secondary structure, making them suitable for phylogenetic a...

Background: Clostridium chauvoei is the etiological agent of blackleg as an endogenous infection in cattle.  Flagella have been known to play a critical role in the protective immunity of animals to clostridial infections. C.chauvoei has two copies of fliC gene, namely fliA and fliB. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was the determination and nucleotide sequence analysis of both copies of fliC ...

today, most of the big cities or metropolises around the world have been encountering with the problem of informal habitation. the present study, thus, tries to focus on the role of endogenous development in such type of habitation process. for that matter, the paper takes into account architectural programming and urbanism as its theoretical framework because the endogenous development is rela...

Gases such as NO and CO play important roles both in normal physiology and in disease. In recent years, interest has been directed towards other naturally occurring gases, notably H 2 S, which is produced in body by three enzymes namely CBS (cystathionine beta synthase), CSE (cystathionine gamma lyase) and MST (3-Mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase), present in mitochondria and/or cytosols where...

The recent development of transposon and CRISPR-Cas9-based tools for manipulating the fly genome in vivo promises tremendous progress in our ability to study developmental processes. Tools for introducing tags into genes at their endogenous genomic loci facilitate imaging or biochemistry approaches at the cellular or subcellular levels. Similarly, the ability to make specific alterations to the...