The cytotoxic ribonuclease alpha-sarcin is the best characterized member of the ribotoxin family. Ribotoxins share a common structural core, catalytic residues, and active site topology with members of the broader family of nontoxic microbial extracellular RNases. They are, however, much more specific in their biological action. To shed light on the highly specific alpha-sarcin activity, we hav...

A reanalysis of products formed after short-term incubation of sugarcane (Saccharum spp. hybrid cv H50-7209) vacuole preparations with uridine diphosphate [(14)C]glucose was performed. The results indicated that the ethanol-soluble substance previously identified as sucrose did not elute with sucrose when subjected to high performance liquid chromatography but had the same retention time as a d...

Recent major advances in x-ray imaging and spectroscopy of clusters have allowed the determination of their mass and mass profile out to approximately 1/2 the virial radius. In rich clusters, most of the baryonic mass is in the gas phase, and the ratio of mass in gas/stars varies by a factor of 2-4. The baryonic fractions vary by a factor of approximately 3 from cluster to cluster and almost al...

Isopentenyl phosphate kinase (IPK) catalyzes the phosphorylation of isopentenyl phosphate to form the isoprenoid precursor isopentenyl diphosphate in the archaeal mevalonate pathway. This enzyme is highly homologous to fosfomycin kinase (FomA), an antibiotic resistance enzyme found in a few strains of Streptomyces and Pseudomonas whose mode of action is inactivation by phosphorylation. Superpos...

A pathological complete response (pCR) after neoadjuvant chemotherapy is observed in approximately 20% of breast cancer patients. A proteomic analysis was performed on plasma and tumor tissue before treatment to evaluate its potential impact on the prediction of response. One hundred and forty-nine breast cancer patients eligible for neoadjuvant c...

Bacterial type II toxin-antitoxin modules are protein-protein complexes whose functions are finely tuned by rapidly changing environmental conditions. E. coli toxin YafQ is suppressed under steady state growth conditions by virtue of its interaction with its cognate antitoxin, DinJ. During stress, DinJ is proteolytically degraded and free YafQ halts translation by degrading ribosome-bound mRNA ...

In this article we analyze the determinants of the functional distribution of government expenditure using for this purpose the models of the median voter's demand common in public choice literature. First of all, we review the economic literature on the factors affecting each component of government expenditure. Then, secondly, we develop a demand model of expenditure structure and we estimate...