In the past two decades there have been major advances in the development of liposomal drug delivery systems suitable for applications ranging from cancer chemotherapy to gene therapy. In general, an optimized system consists of liposomes with a diameter of approximately 100 nm that possess a long circulation lifetime (half-life >5 h). Such liposomes will circulate sufficiently long to take adv...

Clostridium pasteurianum is receiving growing attention for its unique metabolic properties, particularly its ability to convert waste glycerol and glycerol-rich byproducts into butanol, a prospective biofuel. Genetic tool development and whole genome sequencing have recently been investigated to advance the genetic tractability of this potential industrial host. Nevertheless, methodologies for...

BACKGROUND Replication of the ColE1 plasmid of Escherichia coli is regulated by the interaction of sense and antisense plasmid-encoded transcripts. The antisense RNA I negatively regulates the replication of the plasmid by duplex formation with complementary RNA II. The interaction is initiated by the formation of a double helix between seven-nucleotide loops from each RNA and is stabilized by ...

The ColE1 plasmid of E. coli encodes a small RNA-binding protein, Rop, which is involved in the regulation of plasmid copy number. Rop, a 4-helix bundle protein, facilitates sense-antisense RNA pairing by binding to the transiently formed hairpin pairs of RNA I and the complementary RNA II. We have identified the residues of Rop that are involved in RNA recognition. The residues form a narrow s...

Immunoglobulin heavy-chain (IgH) class switch recombination (CSR) is initiated by DNA breakage in the switch (S) region featuring tandem repetitive nucleotide sequences. Various studies have demonstrated that S-region transcription and splicing proceed to genomic recombination and are indispensable for CSR in vivo, although the precise molecular mechanism is largely unknown. Here, we show the n...

We established a plasmid-based system for generating infectious influenza virus-like particles entirely from cloned cDNAs. Human embryonic kidney cells (293T) were transfected with plasmids encoding the influenza A virus structural proteins and with a plasmid encoding an influenza virus-like viral RNA (vRNA) which contained an antisense copy of the cDNA for green fluorescence protein (GFP) flan...

EGS (external guide sequence) technology is a promising approach to designing new antibiotics. EGSs are short antisense oligoribonucleotides that induce RNase P-mediated cleavage of a target RNA by forming a precursor tRNA-like complex. The ftsZ mRNA secondary structure was modeled and EGSs complementary to two regions with high probability of being suitable targets were designed. In vitro reac...

fragments, containing the normal sequences, have been examined for their gene correction abilities by the small fragment homologous replacement (SFHR) method. Correction of mutations in the CFTR and dystrophin genes by the SFHR method has been examined and partial gene corrections were obtained. The corrected genes should be properly expressed under the control of the original promoter. When co...