Tumor gangliosides are biologically active (immunosuppressive and tumor-enhancing) cell surface molecules which are shed into the circulation in vivo. However, the mechanism of transport of these molecules (i.e., in solution or bound to proteins or other lipids) is not known. To resolve this question we traced, by direct chemical detection, the serum localization of a specific human tumor gangl...

Drug dealer motivation is traditionally attributed to individual greed or social structural pressures resulting from poor social conditions or blocked opportunities. To date, few scholars have seriously considered that underlying personality characteristics might shape an individual’s decisions to participate in the illegal drug market. This paper builds upon the tenets of Adlerian Individual P...

The PRINTS database houses a collection of protein fingerprints. These may be used to make family and tentative functional assignments for uncharacterised sequences. The September 2001 release (version 32.0) includes 1600 fingerprints, encoding approximately 10 000 motifs, covering a range of globular and membrane proteins, modular polypeptides and so on. In addition to its continued steady gro...

Because earlier studies showed the cell surface heparan sulfate proteoglycan, syndecan-2, sheds from colon cancer cells in culture, the functional roles of shed syndecan-2 were assessed. A non-cleavable mutant of syndecan-2 in which the Asn148-Leu149 residues were replaced with Asn148-Ile149, had decreased shedding, less cancer-associated activities of syndecan-2 in vitro, and less syndecan-2-m...

An appartus and technique for quantitative comparison of the aerobic bacterial flora disseminated by human subjects has been developed. Dissemination from three healthy subjects was studied weekly for 3 weeks. Viable particles recovered ranged from 100,000 for one subject during a 30-min period to 620,000 for another subject during a 10-min period. One of the three subjects showed appreciably l...

We developed a novel orthotopic mouse tumor model of renal cell carcinoma to collect and characterize cells spontaneously shed from SN12C (renal cell carcinoma) and SN12L1 (high metastatic variant of SN12C) tumors grown in kidneys of severe combined immunodeficient mice. Viability of the shed cell population was greater for SN12L1 tumors (25%) compared with SN12C tumors (11%, P < 0.05). Gene ar...

-adrenergic receptor ( -AR) signaling in cardiac myocytes influences contractile and relaxation states in the heart. Classically, following hormone activation, -AR preferentially couples with Gs, which in turn activates adenylyl cyclase and cAMP production. The predominant effector of cAMP, cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA), then phosphorylates many proteins important for cardiac function suc...