Alpha-tocopherol transfer protein (alpha-TTP) is a liver protein responsible for the selective retention of alpha-tocopherol from dietary vitamin E, which is a mixture of alpha, beta, gamma, and delta-tocopherols and the corresponding tocotrienols. The alpha-TTP-mediated transfer of alpha-tocopherol into nascent VLDL is the major determinant of plasma alpha-tocopherol levels in humans. Mutation...

Protein function is related to protein structure, and understanding disease-associated structural changes is critical both to understanding protein-mediated illness and to developing clinical therapies. We have developed a visual analytics tool called ContactWalker that uses molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the structural and physical differences between wild type and disease-assoc...

alpha-Tocopherol transfer protein (alpha-TTP) maintains the concentration of serum alpha-tocopherol (vitamin E), one of the most potent fat-soluble antioxidants, by facilitating alpha-tocopherol export from the liver. Mutations of the alpha-TTP gene are linked to ataxia with isolated vitamin E deficiency (AVED). We produced a model mouse of AVED by deleting the alpha-TTP gene, which showed atax...

CONTEXT Admissions to the emergency department (ED) can be distressing to patients with advanced cancer receiving palliative care. There is limited research about the clinical characteristics of these patients and whether these ED visits can be categorized as avoidable or unavoidable. OBJECTIVES To determine the frequency of potentially avoidable ED visits (AvEDs) for patients with advanced c...

The genome-sequenced, Gram-positive bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis harbours an orthologue (SAV_3032) of the previously identified epi-isozizaene synthase (SCO5222) in Streptomyces coelicolor A3(2). The sav3032 is translationally coupled with the downstream sav3031 gene encoding the cytochrome P450 CYP170A2 analogous to SCO5223 (CYP170A1) of S. coelicolor A3(2), which exhibits a similar tran...

Patients with a -tocopherol transfer protein ( a TTP) defects experience neurological symptoms characteristic of vitamin E deficiency and depend on continuous high a -tocopherol supplements. We investigated the excretion of 2,5,7,8-tetramethyl-2(2 9 -carboxyethyl)-6-hydroxychroman ( a -CEHC), a urinary metabolite of a -tocopherol, as a putative marker for the a -tocopherol status of a -TTP-defi...

6,8a-deoxy derivatives of avermectins produced by a mutant strain of Streptomyces avermitilis K20571} derived by mutation from strain K2038 producing avermectins B l a and B2a selectively2). The parent strain K2038 carries two types of mutations, C-5 0-methylation (aveD) and the selective incorporation of branched-chain fatty acid into the avermectin molecule (X). The mutant strain K2057 has an...

In order to improve the recognition accuracy of speech emotion recognition, in this paper, a novel hierarchical method based on improved Decision Directed Acyclic Graph SVM (improved DDAGSVM) is proposed for speech emotion recognition. The improved DDAGSVM is constructed according to the confusion degrees of emotion pairs. In addition, a geodesic distance-based testing algorithm is proposed for...

We used multiple sets of simulations both at the atomistic and coarse-grained level of resolution to investigate interaction and binding of α-tochoperol transfer protein (α-TTP) to phosphatidylinositol phosphate lipids (PIPs). Our calculations indicate that enrichment of membranes with such lipids facilitate membrane anchoring. Atomistic models suggest that PIP can be incorporated into the bind...