Doxorubicin, a DNA-intercalator, is one of several anti-cancer drugs that have been found to stabilizes topoisomerase II cleavage complexes at drug-specific DNA sites. The distribution and DNA sequence environments of doxorubicin-stabilized sites were determined in the SV40 genome. The sites were found to be most concentrated in the major nuclear matrix-associated region and nearly absent in th...

    Topical drug dosage forms such as ointments and creams can be easily removed through wetting, movement and contact. The new bioadhesive formulations with enhanced local anesthetic effects are needed for topical administration. The adhesive capacity of hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) was determined by measuring the maximum detachment force and the adhesion work with an auto peeling test...

Hyperosmotic agents have shown great potential in tissue optical clearing. However, the low efficiency of the permeation in biological tissues seriously restricts its application in reality. The synergy of sonophoresis as a penetration enhancer and hyperosmotic agents, 20% glucose (G) and 20% mannitol (M), in optical clearing has been investigated by analyzing the variation of the attenuation c...

The clinical applicability of antibodies and plasmonic nanosensors as topically applied, molecule-specific optical diagnostic agents for noninvasive early detection of cancer and precancer is severely limited by our inability to efficiently deliver macromolecules and nanoparticles through mucosal tissues. We have developed an imidazole-functionalized conjugate of the polysaccharide chitosan (ch...

To determine whether enhancer elements in addition to the highly conserved octamer (OCTA)-nucleotide motif are important for lymphoid-specific expression of the immunoglobulin heavy-chain (IgH) gene, we have investigated the effect of mutating the binding site for a putative additional lymphoid-specific transcription factor, designated NF-microB, in the murine IgH enhancer. We demonstrate that ...

Regulation of both transcription and RNA splicing requires enhancer elements, that is, &-acting DNA or RNA sequences that promote the activities of linked promoters or splice sites, respectively. Both types of enhancer associate with regulatory proteins to form multicomponent enhancer complexes that recruit the necessary enzymatic machinery to promoter or splice site recognition sequences. This...

Expression of the cdc2 gene is induced steeply at the G1-S-phase boundary. The previous analysis of promoter elements that confer inducibility revealed the enhancer at positions -276 to -265. Enhancer activity is suppressed by the upstream sequence that seems to contain the silencer. The silencer element was analyzed by fusing several oligonucleotides covering the silencer region upstream of th...

We examined how remote enhancers establish physical communication with target promoters to activate gene transcription in response to environmental signals. Although the natural IFN-beta enhancer is located immediately upstream of the core promoter, it also can function as a classical enhancer element conferring virus infection-dependent activation of heterologous promoters, even when it is pla...