Muscle ring finger (MuRF)1 is a muscle-specific protein implicated in the regulation of cardiac myocyte size and contractility. MuRF2, a closely related family member, redundantly interacts with protein substrates and heterodimerizes with MuRF1. Mice lacking either MuRF1 or MuRF2 are phenotypically normal, whereas mice lacking both proteins develop a spontaneous cardiac and skeletal muscle hype...

1 Introduction Conjecture 1.1 (since 1992) G ⊂ SL(n, C) is a finite subgroup. Assume that the quotient X = C n /G has a crepant resolution f : Y → X (this just means that K Y = 0, so that Y is a " noncompact Calabi–Yau manifold "). Then there exist " natural " bijections {irreducible representations of G} → basis of H * (Y, Z) (1) {conjugacy classes of G} → basis of H * (Y, Z) (2) As a slogan "...

It is well known that spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) develop muscle pathologies with hypertension and heart failure, though the mechanism remains poorly understood. Woon et al. (2007) linked the circadian clock gene Bmal1 to hypertension and metabolic dysfunction in the SHR. Building on these findings, we compared the expression pattern of several core-clock genes in the gastrocnemius mu...

E volution has provided the cardiovascular system with several strategies for the acquisition of tissue-specific phenotypes. Many contractile proteins, for example, are encoded by small multigene families whose differential expression in ventricular, atrial, smooth, fast-twitch, and slow-twitch muscle distinguishes one type of myogenic tissue from another. The diversity of other contractile pro...

Obesity and associated metabolic disturbances, such as increased circulating fatty acids cause prolonged low grade activation of inflammatory signaling pathways in liver, skeletal muscle, adipose tissue and even in the CNS. Activation of inflammatory pathways in turn impairs insulin signaling, ultimately leading to obesity-associated type 2 diabetes mellitus. Conventional JNK-1 knock out mice a...

At various intervals after plating, cultures were exposed to 2-h pulses of tritium-labeled leucine. For determination of incorporated radioactivity, the creatine kinases were isolated by specific immunoprecipitation. Sodium dodecyl sulfate-gel electrophoresis was used to separate the two types of creatine kinase subunits MCK and B-CK from each other and their radioactivity was determined in the...

1 Introduction Conjecture 1.1 (since 1992) G ⊂ SL(n, C) is a finite subgroup. Assume that the quotient X = C n /G has a crepant resolution f : Y → X (this just means that K Y = 0, so that Y is a " noncompact Calabi–Yau manifold "). Then there exist " natural " bijections {irreducible representations of G} → basis of H * (Y, Z) (1) {conjugacy classes of G} → basis of H * (Y, Z) (2) As a slogan "...

The System L1-type amino acid transporter mediates transport of large neutral amino acids (LNAA) in many mammalian cell-types. LNAA such as leucine are required for full activation of the mTOR-S6K signalling pathway promoting protein synthesis and cell growth. The SLC7A5 (LAT1) catalytic subunit of high-affinity System L1 functions as a glycoprotein-associated heterodimer with the multifunction...

An orbifold is a singular space which is locally modeled on the quotient of a smooth manifold by a smooth action of a finite group. It appears naturally in geometry and topology when group actions on manifolds are involved and the stabilizer of each fixed point is finite. The concept of an orbifold was first introduced by Satake under the name “V -manifold” in a paper where he also extended the...

Nebulin is a giant filamentous protein that is coextensive with the actin filaments of the skeletal muscle sarcomere. Nebulin mutations are the main cause of nemaline myopathy (NEM), with typical adult patients having low expression of nebulin, yet the roles of nebulin in adult muscle remain poorly understood. To establish nebulin's functional roles in adult muscle, we studied a novel condition...