BACKGROUND In past years research has focused on the development of alternative Gram positive bacterial expression systems to produce industrially relevant proteins. Brevibacillus choshinensis is an easy to handle non-sporulating bacterium, lacking extracellular proteases, that has been already shown to provide a high level of recombinant protein expression. One major drawback, limiting the app...

The transcription factor CHOP/GADD153 gene is induced by cellular stress and is involved in mediating apoptosis. We report the identification of a conserved region in the promoter of the CHOP gene responsible for its inducibility by endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. Deletion mutants of the human CHOP promoter identify a region comprising nucleotides -75 to -104 required for both constitutive a...

Bacillus methanolicus is a thermophilic methylotroph able to overproduce amino acids from methanol, a substrate not used for human or animal nutrition. Based on our previous RNA-seq analysis a mannitol inducible promoter and a putative mannitol activator gene mtlR were identified. The mannitol inducible promoter was applied for controlled gene expression using fluorescent reporter proteins and ...

A tetracycline-inducible promoter system was used to generate transgenic tobacco plants that confer inducible expression of the wild type or a dominant negative allele of the gene coding for the cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) of Arabidopsis thaliana CDC2aAt. Although the total extractable CDK activity was doubled, the induced expression of the wild-type CDC2aAt did not correlate with any change ...

A number of essential genes have been identified in mycobacteria, but methods to study these genes have not been developed, leaving us unable to determine the function or biology of the genes. We investigated the use of a tetracycline-inducible expression system in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium smegmatis. Using a reporter gene which encodes an unstable variant of GFP, we showed t...

Site-directed mutagenesis (SDM) as a powerful technique was used to change two important and conserved amino acids in 5-enolpyruvylshikimate 3- phosphate synthase (EPSPS) gene of E. coli. The mutations changed glycine 96 to alanine and alanine 183 to threonine. These two amino acids are very important for intraction of the wide spectrum herbicide, glyphosate, to EPSP synthase enzymes. By design...

IE1 of Autographa californica multicapsid nuclear polyhedrosis virus acts as a transactivator of several viral promoters in insect cells. Transient expression assays indicate that IE1 is involved in the activation of the early promoter he65 in both insect TN-368 and mammalian BHK-21 cell lines. IE1 activation of the he65 promoter was compared with IE1 activation of the early 39K promoter. In co...

Glycoprotein IX is a megakaryocyte-specific gene crucial for adequate and functional expression of the Glycoprotein Ib-IX complex. This study used phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) and thrombopoietin (TPO)-induced differentiation of Dami and UT-7 cells, respectively, to investigate the regulation of inducible Glycoprotein IX expression during megakaryocyte differentiation. PMA and TPO were ...