BACKGROUND Human APPL1 and APPL2 are homologous RAB5 effectors whose binding partners include a diverse set of transmembrane receptors, signaling proteins, and phosphoinositides. APPL proteins associate dynamically with endosomal membranes and are proposed to function in endosome-mediated signaling pathways linking the cell surface to the cell nucleus. APPL proteins contain an N-terminal Bin/Am...

Article history: Received 1 August 2015 Received in revised form 1 December 2015 Accepted 1 February 2016 Available online 17 March 2016 Prior research on the association between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) includes conflicting perspectives and inconclusive findings as to whether or not CSP has a positive, negative, or neutral associationwith CFP...

Ezrin is a member of ezrin, radixin, moesin (ERM) protein family that links F-actin to membranes. The NH(2)- and COOH-terminal association domains of ERM proteins, known respectively as N-ERMAD and C-ERMAD, participate in interactions with membrane proteins and F-actin, and intramolecular and intermolecular interactions within and among ERM proteins. In gastric parietal cells, ezrin is heavily ...

BACKGROUND Currently, reliable efficacy markers for assessment of new interventions against tuberculosis (TB) are limited to disease and death. More precise measurement of the human immune response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection may be important. A qualitative enzyme-linked immunospot assay (ELISPOT) result for early secretory antigenic target 6 (ESAT-6) and culture filtrate protein 10...

Culture filtrate proteins (CFP) of Mycobacterium tuberculosis have been shown to contain immunogenic components that elicit at least partial protective immunity against Mycobacterium infection. To clone genes encoding some of the immunogenic proteins, we made a high-titer rabbit anti-CFP serum and used it to screen an M. tuberculosis genomic expression library in Escherichia coli. In this paper...

Fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) with green fluorescent protein (GFP) variants has become widely used for biochemical research. In order to expand the choice of fluorescent range in FRET analysis, we designed various color versions of the FRET-based probes for caspase activity, in which the substrate sequence of the caspase was sandwiched by donor and acceptor fluorescent proteins,...

Plasmid-DNAgram, a variant of DNAgram, adopted the concept of DNAgram that linguistic information could be encoded on bio-molecular sequences. For example, a DNA restriction map of "BsiWI XhoI EcoRV DraI" could be regarded as a word, "word." Plasmid-DNAgram aims to do linguistic information processing in vivo. To demonstrate this purpose, we used the fused catalytic and regulatory subunits of P...

Biosensors based on the principle of Förster (or fluorescence) resonance energy transfer (FRET) have been developed to visualize spatio-temporal dynamics of signalling molecules in living cells. Many of them adopt a backbone of intramolecular FRET biosensor with a cyan fluorescent protein (CFP) and yellow fluorescent protein (YFP) as donor and acceptor, respectively. However, there remains the ...

The dihydropyridine receptor (DHPR) β1a subunit is essential for skeletal muscle excitation-contraction coupling, but the structural organization of β1a as part of the macromolecular DHPR-ryanodine receptor type I (RyR1) complex is still debatable. We used fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) to probe proximity relationships within the β1a subunit in cultured skeletal myotubes lacking ...

Experiments using live cell 3-color Förster (or fluorescence) resonance energy transfer (FRET) microscopy and corresponding in vitro biochemical reconstitution of the same proteins were conducted to evaluate actin filament nucleation. A novel application of 3-color FRET data is demonstrated, extending the analysis beyond the customary energy-transfer efficiency (E%) calculations. MDCK cells wer...