Ageing is accompanied by a progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength, leading to the loss of functional capacity and an increased risk for developing chronic metabolic diseases such as diabetes. The age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass results from a chronic disruption in the balance between muscle protein synthesis and degradation. As basal muscle protein synthesis rates are li...

Retroviruses are the causative agents of serious diseases, such as acquired immunodeficiency syndromes and several cancers, and are also useful gene therapy vectors. Retroviruses contain two sense-strand RNA genomes, which become linked at their 5¢ ends to form an RNA dimer. Understanding the molecular basis for dimerization may yield new approaches for controlling viral infectivity. Because th...

To accurately predict the modifications done during metabolic processes by cytochrome P450 (P450) 3A enzyme, selecting substrates that best represent a broad range of substrate substitutions and that follow the Michaelis-Menten kinetic properties is highly necessary. In the present study, the oxidative pathways of deoxyschizandrin (DS), the most abundant lignan in Fructus Schisandrae fruit extr...

We report a highly specific, robust and rapid new method for labeling cell surface proteins with biophysical probes. The method uses the Escherichia coli enzyme biotin ligase (BirA), which sequence-specifically ligates biotin to a 15-amino-acid acceptor peptide (AP). We report that BirA also accepts a ketone isostere of biotin as a cofactor, ligating this probe to the AP with similar kinetics a...

OBJECTIVE The validity of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in children and adolescents has not been studied in a rigorous manner reflecting the criteria of Robins and Guze first detailed in 1970. This paper and the others in this series address some aspects of this multifaceted validation paradigm, which requires that a disorder has a known clinical presentation, can be delimited from othe...