PURPOSE To examine the role of the c-Maf transcription factor in the regulation of non-crystallin lens fiber cell specific gene expression. METHODS Expression of lens fiber cell genes in c-Maf null mice was analyzed by immunohistochemical and RT-PCR methods. In addition, the effect of c-Maf on fiber cell gene promoter fragments was examined in co-transfection experiments. RESULTS Examinatio...

c-Maf belongs to the large Maf family of transcription factors and plays a key role in the regulation of cytokine production and differentiation of TH2, TH17, TFH, and Tr1 cells. Invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells can rapidly produce large quantity of TH-related cytokines such as IFN-γ, IL-4, and IL-17A upon stimulation by glycolipid antigens, such as α-galactosylceramide (α-GalCer). Howev...

Lens development provides a good model system for studying cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying embryonic induction and morphogenesis. Members of the large Maf family of transcription factors, L-Maf and c-Maf, have been shown to play key roles in chick and mouse lens development. Here we report identification of two Xenopus maf genes, XmafB and XL-maf, which exhibit unique temporal and ...

BACKGROUND UBE2O is proposed as a ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme, but its function was largely unknown. METHODS Mass spectrometry was applied to identify c-Maf ubiquitination-associated proteins. Immunoprecipitation was applied for c-Maf and UBE2O interaction. Immunoblotting was used for Maf protein stability. Luciferase assay was used for c-Maf transcriptional activity. Lentiviral infections w...

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a currently incurable neoplasm of terminally differentiated B cells. The translocation and/or overexpression of c-MAF have been observed in human MM. Although c-MAF might function as an oncogene in human MM, there has been no report thus far describing the direct induction of MM by c-MAF overexpression in vivo. In this study, we have generated transgenic (TG) mice that ...

Lens development is regulated by a variety of transcription factors with distinct properties. The lens-specific transcription factor, L-Maf, is essential for lens formation and induces lens-specific markers, such as the crystallin genes. In this study, we analyzed the mechanism by which L-Maf regulates delta-crystallin expression. Misexpression of L-Maf in the head ectoderm of lens placode-form...

c-Maf, which is one of the large Maf transcription factors, can bind to Maf recognition element (MARE) and activates transcription of target genes. Although c-Maf is expressed in macrophages and directly regulates the expression of interleukin-10, detailed information regarding its function in the null mutant phenotype of tissue macrophages remain unknown. In this study, we demonstrated that c-...

The Maximum Agreement Forest (Maf) problem is a well-studied problem in evolutionary biology, which asks for a largest common subforest of a given collection of phylogenetic trees with identical leaf label-set. However, the previous work about the Maf problem are mainly on two binary phylogenetic trees or two general (i.e., binary and non-binary) phylogenetic trees. In this paper, we study the ...

Species-specific reaggregation of cells from the marine sponge Microciona prolifera is mediated by a proteoglycan-like aggregation factor (MAF) of Mr = 2 X 10(7) which has two functional domains, a cell binding domain and an aggregation factor interaction domain. After extensive trypsin digestion, over 60% of the MAF mass was converted into a glycopeptide fragment of Mr = 10,000 (T-10) which is...