Similar to other herpesviruses, human cytomegalovirus remains in the infected host following resolution of the primary infection. The ability to persist in the host after primary infection is believed to be strongly influenced by the ability of HCMV to down-regulate immune recognition of infected cells. One of the genes contributing to immune evasion is the US3 gene. The US3 gene has been shown...

A database of alternatively spliced genes (ASDB) has been constructed based on (i) the results of the analysis of Swiss-Prot entries containing products of these genes and (ii) clustering procedure joining proteins that could arise by alternative splicing of the same gene. ASDB incorporates information about alternatively spliced genes, their products and expression patterns. It can be searched...

Alternative splicing of the p53 transcript which so far has been demonstrated only in the murine system has been proposed as a general regulatory mechanism for the generation of functionally different p53 proteins. We analyzed by RT-PCR the pattern of p53 mRNAs within the region spanning exons 10 and 11 of the p53 gene in 13 different tissues from two independent mouse strains, in 10 different ...

The c.2268dup mutation in thyroid peroxidase (TPO) gene was reported to be a founder mutation in Taiwanese patients with dyshormonogenetic congenital hypothyroidism (CH). The functional impact of the mutation is not well documented. In this study, homozygous c.2268dup mutation was detected in two Malaysian-Chinese sisters with goitrous CH. Normal and alternatively spliced TPO mRNA transcripts w...

Oligonucleotide primers for human interleukin-6 (IL-6) that bracketed the entire coding region of the gene were used in reverse transciptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) studies to examine lL-6 expression in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC). In addition to the predicted 0.64-kb RT-PCR product, a second 0.45-kb product was observed. Cloning and dideoxy sequence analysis of this pr...

MOTIVATION Eukaryotic pre-mRNAs are spliced to form mature mRNA. Pre-mRNA alternative splicing greatly increases the complexity of gene expression. Estimates show that more than half of the human genes and at least one-third of the genes of less complex organisms, such as nematodes or flies, are alternatively spliced. In this work, we consider one major form of alternative splicing, namely the ...

PURPOSE Preliminary evidence indicates that telomerase activity is significantly less expressed in typical carcinoids than in large cell neuroendocrine carcinomas or in small cell lung cancers. Knowledge of the mechanisms by which telomerase is differentially regulated in neuroendocrine lung tumors is important for a better understanding of the pathogenesis of these malignancies. EXPERIMENTAL...

Recent in vitro studies have shown that interleukin 4 (IL-4) induces and gamma interferon (IFN-gamma) inhibits collagen production. To define the TH1(IFN-gamma) and TH2(IL-4) cytokine profiles in systemic sclerosis (Sscl), a disease characterized by widespread fibrosis, we investigated IL-4 and IFN-gamma transcripts in peripheral blood mononuclear cells and plasma protein levels in 13 patients ...

Post-transcriptional processes such as alternative splicing and RNA editing have a huge impact on the diversity of the proteome. Detecting alternatively spliced transcripts is dif®cult when they are rare. In addition, edited transcripts often differ from the genomic sequence by only a few nucleotides. Denaturing high performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) is routinely used for single nucleot...

The clock-regulated RNA-binding protein AtGRP7 (Arabidopsis thaliana glycine-rich RNA-binding protein) influences circadian oscillations of its transcript by negative feedback at the post-transcriptional level. Here we show that site-specific mutation of one conserved arginine to glutamine within the RNA recognition motif impairs binding of recombinant AtGRP7 to its pre-mRNA in vitro. This corr...