The toxins produced by Clostridium difficile share several functional properties with other bacterial toxins, like the heat-labile enterotoxin of Escherichia coli and cholera toxin. However, functional and structural differences also exist. Like cholera toxin, their main target is the disruption of the microfilaments in the cell. However, since these effects are not reversible, as found with ch...

The genomic action of calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxy-vitamin D3) is mediated through the interaction of the calcitriol receptor (VDR) with vitamin D response elements (VDREs). Although renal failure is associated with resistance to the action of calcitriol, the mechanism of this resistance is not well understood. Therefore, we used the electrophoretic mobility shift assay to compare the ability of ...

Large bacterial protein toxins autotranslocate functional effector domains to the eukaryotic cell cytosol, resulting in alterations to cellular functions that ultimately benefit the infecting pathogen. Among these toxins, the clostridial glucosylating toxins (CGTs) produced by Gram-positive bacteria and the multifunctional-autoprocessing RTX (MARTX) toxins of Gram-negative bacteria have distinc...

In Sec B we extend the robustness test to compare PointNet with VoxNet on incomplete input. In Sec C we provide more details on neural network architectures, training parameters and in Sec D we describe our detection pipeline in scenes. Then Sec E illustrates more applications of PointNet, while Sec F shows more analysis experiments. Sec G provides a proof for our theory on PointNet. At last, w...

Targeted toxins, consisting of tumor-selective ligands coupled to polypeptide toxins, represent a new class of cancer therapeutics that kills malignant cells by inactivating cytosolic protein synthesis and inducing apoptosis. A number of these molecules have been produced under good manufacturing practice conditions and given systemically to patients with a variety of neoplasms. The promising r...

Many airborne toxins produce local noxious effects on the airways and lungs as irritants. The respiratory tract can also serve as a portal of entry for systemic poisons as simple or systemic asphyxiants. Inhalational exposure can be covert and indolent (as in occupational exposure to asbestos or urban exposure to photochemical smog) or fulminant and obvious. The circumstances and location of th...

The trace element selenium is found in proteins as selenocysteine (Sec), the 21st amino acid to participate in ribosome-mediated translation. The substrate for ribosomal protein synthesis is selenocysteinyl-tRNA(Sec). Its biosynthesis from seryl-tRNA(Sec) has been established for bacteria, but the mechanism of conversion from Ser-tRNA(Sec) remained unresolved for archaea and eukarya. Here, we p...