The receptor tyrosine kinase c-met is over-expressed in several types of human tumours. In hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), its expression is inversely correlated to patient survival. To determine the role of c-met in the malignant properties of HCC cells, we tested the effectiveness of two ablative strategies to down-modulate c-met expression in SKHep1C3, an HCC-derived cell line, i.e. stable e...

Trypanothione reductase (TR), a flavoprotein oxidoreductase present in trypanosomatids but absent in human cells, is regarded as a potential target for the chemotherapy of several tropical parasitic diseases caused by trypanosomes and leishmanias. We investigated the possibility of modulating intracellular TR levels in Trypanosoma cruzi by generating transgenic lines that extrachromosomally ove...

  Background & Objectives: Antisense peptide nucleic acids (PNA) that target growth essential genes show potent bactericidal properties without cell lysis. We considered the possibility that whether PNA treatment influence the bacteria total nucleic acids content and apply approach to develop a new delivery system to Dendritic cells (DCs). DCs are the most potent antigen presenting cells in th...

Antisense RNA complementary to a putative helicase gene (hel3.1) of a cos-type Streptococcus thermophilus bacteriophage was used to impede the proliferation of a number of cos-type S. thermophilus bacteriophages and one pac-type bacteriophage. The putative helicase gene is a component of the Sfi21-type DNA replication module, which is found in a majority of the S. thermophilus bacteriophages of...

The chemical nature of genetic drugs (e.g. antisense oligonucleotides, siRNA, vectors) requires a suitable carrier system to protect them from enzymatic degradation without changing their properties and enable efficient delivery into target cells. Lipid vectors for nucleic acid delivery that have been widely investigated for years can be very effective. As the majority of attempts made in the f...

Agrobacterium species are capable of interkingdom gene transfer between bacteria and plants. The genome of Agrobacterium tumefaciens consists of a circular and a linear chromosome, the At-plasmid and the Ti-plasmid, which harbors bacterial virulence genes required for tumor formation in plants. Little is known about promoter sequences and the small RNA (sRNA) repertoire of this and other α-prot...

To enhance plasmid segregational stability in bacterial cells, two pairs of independent postsegregational killing loci (genes which induce host killing upon plasmid loss) isolated from plasmids R1, R483, or RP4 (hok+/sok+ pnd+ or hok+/sok+ parDE+) were cloned into a common site of the beta-galactosidase expression vector pMJR1750 (ptac::lacZ+) to form a series of plasmids in which the effect of...

Transient plasmid transfection is a common approach in studies in cultured mammalian cells. To examine behavior of transfected plasmids, we analyzed their transcriptional landscape by deep sequencing. We have found that the entire plasmid sequence is transcribed at different levels. Spurious transcription may have undesirable effects as some plasmids, when co-transfected, inhibited expression o...

Survivin plays an important role in cancer development. We aim to show here that suppression of survivin expression or function by antisense and dominant-negative (DN) mutant can inhibit gastric cancer carcinogenesis and angiogenesis in vivo. Plasmid constructs expressing survivin antisense and DN mutant replacing the cysteine residue at amino acid 84 with alanine (Cys84Ala) were prepared and i...

Replication of rolling circle plasmid pKYM was regulated by RepK, a plasmid-encoded initiator protein, with HU protein and antisense RNA (copRNA) that block the expression of RepK. HU protein bound to the repK promoter in the presence of RepK protein and inhibited the transcription of repK mRNA. The copRNA would hybridize to repK mRNA and induce a stem-loop structure in which the repK Shine-Dal...