In this issue of the JCI, Wu et al. and Marin et al. describe two new mouse models of inherited disorders of the RAS/MAPK signal transduction pathway that display hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM); the model from the former paper was from a gain-of-function Raf1 mutation, and the model from the latter paper was from a protein tyrosine phosphatase, non-receptor type 11 (Ptpn11) mutated allele en...

Protein farnesylation involves the covalent addition of a 15carbon isoprenoid lipid moiety to the cysteine residue of a Cterminal CAAX motif (reviewed by Sinensky, 2000; Crul et al., 2001). Farnesylated proteins include the Ras GTPase, prelamin A, lamin B, fungal pheromones and rhodopsin kinase. Although most farnesylated proteins are found associated with membranes, farnesylation may also medi...

The activated oncogene c-Ha-ras induces expression of the surface glycoprotein CD44 in cloned rat embryonic fibroblasts (CREF). Induction is transcriptional as shown by transient cotransfections of c-Ha-ras expression constructs and CD44 promoter reporter gene constructs and depends on the presence of an AP-1 binding site at position -110. Increased transcript levels for the standard isoform of...

Copyright: © 2013 Angeli F. et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The Renin-Angiotensin System (RAS) is a complex regulatory system with many identifiable actions. It may primarily be viewed a...

Dear Editor: We would like to call the attention of the readers on a biochemical aspect generating occasional disputes in studies concerned with oxidative stress-related apoptosis. The paper recently published in this journal by Moon et al. (2012) documents that the mutation of K-RAS in prostate epithelial cells causes the activation of the ERK signalling pathway and an increased expression of ...

Copyright: © 2013 Angeli F. et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The Renin-Angiotensin System (RAS) is a complex regulatory system with many identifiable actions. It may primarily be viewed a...