A surface plasmon resonance imaging-based Ni(2+)-iminodiacetic acid-coated gold chip system was developed to enable specific detection of a hexahistidine-tagged recombinant protein in crude extracts or in column chromatography fractions. This system is especially advantageous for high-throughput analysis of multiple proteins.

Fluorescent probes are essential for the exploration of protein function, detection of molecular interactions, and conformational changes. The nitrilotriacetic acid derivatives of different chromophores were successfully used for site-selective noncovalent fluorescence labeling of histidine-tagged proteins. All of them, however, suffer from the same drawback--loss of the fluorescence upon bindi...

Affinity tags have become powerful tools from basic biological research to structural and functional proteomics. They were widely used to facilitate the purification and detection of proteins of interest, as well as the separation of protein complexes. Here, we mainly discuss the benefits and drawbacks of several affinity or epitope tags frequently used, including hexahistidine tag, FLAG tag, S...

• Evidence of effectiveness: This intervention has been evaluated in six well-conducted randomized controlled trials, and found to produce a sizable increase in the quit rate: 13.9% of women assigned to the intervention quit smoking in the last 4-5 months of their pregnancy, compared with 8.3% of the women assigned to the control group. In almost all cases, these effects were statistically-sign...

Akın for his valuable comments during the thesis defense and also his trust on me for offering a part-time instructorship position in the department during my studies. I had a long and confusing journey for this thesis in the last seven years. Unfortunately , not being an idealist full-time PhD candidate researcher all the time, PhD dissertation seemed to be the main motivation that seriously a...

On April 29, 2015, the neuroscience community lost an accomplished and beloved scientist when Dominique Muller died in an accident in the French Alps south of Grenoble. He passed away doing his favorite pastime: plane gliding. Dominique had a fiery curiosity that is at the heart of good science. He lived his passion for research in the laboratory, combining experimental creativity, warm mentors...

Mussel adhesive proteins have been suggested as a basis for environmentally friendly adhesives for use in aqueous conditions and in medicine. However, attempts to produce functional and economical recombinant mussel adhesive proteins (mainly foot protein type 1) in several systems have failed. Here, the cDNA coding for Mytilus galloprovincialis foot protein type 5 (Mgfp-5) was isolated for the ...

Natural proteins are often confined within their local microenvironments, such as three-dimensional confinement in organelles or two-dimensional confinement in lipid rafts on cytoplasmic membrane. Spatial confinement restricts proteins' entropic freedom, forces their lateral interaction, and induces new properties that the same proteins lack at the soluble state. So far, the phenomenon of envir...