HIV-1 provirus integration results in a persistent latently infected reservoir that is recalcitrant to combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) with lifelong treatment being the only option. The "shock and kill" strategy aims to eradicate latent HIV by reactivating proviral gene expression in the context of cART treatment. Gene-specific transcriptional activation can be achieved using the RNA-gui...

A bacterial colony may develop a small number of cells genetically identical to, but phenotypically different from, other normally growing bacteria. These so-called persister cells keep themselves in a dormant state and thus are insensitive to antibiotic treatment, resulting in serious problems of drug resistance. In this paper, we proposed a novel strategy to 'kill' persister cells by triggeri...

We report a general strategy for creating protein kinases in mammalian cells that are poised for very rapid activation by light. By photoactivating a caged version of MEK1, we demonstrate the specific, rapid, and receptor independent activation of an artificial subnetwork within the Raf/MEK/ERK pathway. Time-lapse microscopy allowed us to precisely characterize the kinetics of elementary steps ...

This paper extends the widely used activation strategy of the marking game on graphs to asymmetric marking games. The extended activation strategy is then applied to asymmetric marking games on chordal graphs, (s, t)-pseudo partial k-trees and interval graphs. Our results improve earlier upper bounds on (a, 1)gcol (Ik) and (a, 1)-gcol (Ck), where Ik and Ck denote the classes of interval and cho...

This study examined naturally-occurring university classroom interactions at Iranian universities and provided an analysis of silence patterns as politeness strategies used by male and female students. Since empirical studies of silence in classroom settings are scarce, this paper aimed to explain such phenomena using participant interviews, classroom observation and detailed discourse analysis...

Promoters with tissue-specific activity are very useful to address cell-autonomous and non cell autonomous functions of candidate genes. Although this strategy is widely used in Arabidopsis thaliana, its use to study tissue-specific regulation of root symbiotic interactions in legumes has only started recently. Moreover, using tissue specific promoter activity to drive a GAL4-VP16 chimeric tran...

Similarity-based virtual screening is a fundamental tool in the early drug discovery process and relies heavily on molecular fingerprints. We propose novel strategy of generating domain-specific fingerprints by training neural networks target-specific bioactivity datasets using activation as new representation. The network expected to combine information already known bioactive compounds with u...