Several approaches exist for the quantification of proteins in complex samples processed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry followed by fragmentation analysis (MS2). One of these approaches is label-free MS2-based quantification, which takes advantage of the information computed from MS2 spectrum observations to estimate the abundance of a protein in a sample. As a first step in this ap...

The spatial organization and dynamics of chromatin play important roles in essential biological functions. However, direct visualization of endogenous genomic loci in living cells has proven to be laborious until the recent development of CRISPR-Cas9-based chromatin labeling methods. These methods rely on the recognition of specific DNA sequences by CRISPR single-guide RNAs (sgRNAs) and fluores...

The failure to eliminate self-reactive T cells during negative selection is a prerequisite for autoimmunity. To escape deletion, autoreactive T-cell receptors (TCRs) may form unstable complexes with self-peptide-MHC by adopting suboptimal binding topologies compared with anti-microbial TCRs. Alternatively, escape can occur by weak binding between self-peptides and MHC. We determined the structu...

Background: Existent programs for RNA folding kinetics, such as Kinefold, Kinfold and KFOLD,implement the Gillespie algorithm to generate stochastic folding trajectories from an initial structure sto a target structure t, in which each intermediate secondary structure is obtained from its predecessorby the application of a move from a given move set. The Kinfold move set MS1 [resp. ...

Diagnostic systems based on reverse transcription (RT)-PCR are widely used for the detection of viral genomes in different human specimens. The application of internal controls (IC) to monitor each step of nucleic acid amplification is necessary to prevent false-negative results due to inhibition or human error. In this study, we designed various real-time RT-PCRs utilizing the coliphage MS2 re...

Aberrant expression of BORIS/CTCFL (Brother of the Regulator of Imprinted Sites/CTCF-like protein) is reported in different malignancies. In this study, we characterized the entire promoter region of BORIS/CTCFL, including the CpG islands, to assess the relationship between BORIS expression and lung cancer. To simplify the construction of luciferase reporter cassettes with various-sized portion...

Live imaging of transcription and RNA dynamics has been successful in cultured cells and tissues of vertebrates but is challenging to accomplish in vivo. The zebrafish offers important advantages to study these processes – optical transparency during embryogenesis, genetic tractability and rapid development. Therefore, to study transcription and RNA dynamics in an intact vertebrate organism, we...