Ribosome inactivating proteins are enzymes that depurinate a specific adenine residue in the alpha-sarcin-ricin loop of the large ribosomal RNA, being ricin and Shiga toxins the most renowned examples. They are widely distributed in plants and their presence has also been confirmed in a few bacterial species. According to this taxonomic distribution, the current model about the origin and evolu...

Staphylococcal bacteria are a prevalent cause of infections associated with foreign bodies and indwelling medical devices. Bacteria are capable of escaping antibiotic treatment through encapsulation into biofilms. RNA III-inhibiting peptide (RIP) is a heptapeptide that inhibits staphylococcal biofilm formation by obstructing quorum-sensing mechanisms. K(4)-S4(1-13)(a) is a 13-residue dermasepti...

Many emerging applications involve sparse signals, and their processing is a subject of active research. We desire a large class of sensing matrices which allow the user to discern important properties of the measured sparse signal. Of particular interest are matrices with the restricted isometry property (RIP). RIP matrices are known to enable efficient and stable reconstruction of sufficientl...

Regulated intramembrane proteolysis (Rip) is an ancient and widespread process by which cells transmit information from one compartment (the endoplasmic reticulum) to another (the nucleus). Two separate cleavages that are carried out by two separate proteases are required for Rip. The first protease cleaves its protein substrate within an extracytoplasmic domain; the second cleaves it within a ...

MHC class II molecules are critical determinants of genetic susceptibility to human type 1 diabetes. In patients, the most common haplotype contains the DRA1*0101-DRB1*0401 (DR4) and DQA1*0301-DQB1*0302 (DQ8) loci. To assess directly the relative roles of HLA-DQ8 and DR4 for diabetes development in vivo, we generated C57BL/6 transgenic mice that lack endogenous mouse MHC class II molecules but ...

RIP-seq has recently been developed to discover genome-wide RNA transcripts that interact with a protein or protein complex. RIP-seq is similar to both RNA-seq and ChIP-seq, but presents unique properties and challenges. Currently, no statistical tool is dedicated to RIP-seq analysis. We developed RIPSeeker (http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/2.12/bioc/html/RIPSeeker.html), a free open-source...

The usual method of calibrating the respiratory inductive plethysmograph (RIP) is to have the subject breathe over a rather narrow volume range, either resting tidal volume or into a bag containing a fixed larger volume, in both the standing and supine positions. During a previous study in our laboratory using the RIP to quantify ventilation during sleep in young and elderly adults, we began to...

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) elicits a diverse array of inflammatory responses through engagement of its type-1 receptor (TNFR1). Many of these responses require de novo gene expression mediated by the activator protein-1 (AP-1) transcription factor. We investigated the mechanism by which TNFR1 recruits the stress-activated protein kinases (SAPKs) and the p38s, two mitogen-activated protein kina...