The defining characteristic of a tumor cell is its ability to escape the constraints imposed by neighboring cells, invade the surrounding tissue and metastasize to distant sites. This invasive property of tumor cells is dependent on activation of proteinases at the cell surface. The serine proteinase plasmin is one of the key proteinases that participate in the pericellular proteolysis associat...

L1 is a neural recognition molecule that promotes neural developmental and regenerative processes. Posttranslational cleavage of L1 is believed to be important for regulating its function in vivo, but little is known of the proteolytic systems responsible. In this study we present evidence that plasmin can regulate both L1 expression and function. The addition of plasmin to cell lines results i...

itor in blood plasma is higher than that in serum obtained from the blood clotted in the presence ofcalcium ions, but is the same as that in serum obtained in the absence of calcium ions. Radiolabeled a2-plasmin inhibitor was covalently bound to fibrin only when calcium ions were present at the time of clotting of plasma or fibrinogen. Whereas, when batroxobin, a snake venom enzyme that lacks t...

Tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA) is an extracellular protease that converts plasminogen into plasmin. For tPA to generate plasmin under biologic conditions, a cofactor must first bring tPA and plasminogen into physical proximity. Fibrin provides this cofactor for tPA-mediated plasmin generation in blood. Despite being naturally devoid of fibrin(ogen), tPA-mediated plasmin formation also ...

The coagulation and fibrinolytic pathways regulate hemostasis and thrombosis, and an imbalance in these pathways may result in pathologic hemophilia or thrombosis. The plasminogen system is the primary proteolytic pathway for fibrinolysis, but also has important proteolytic functions in cell migration, extracellular matrix degradation, metalloproteinase activation, and hormone processing. Sever...

THE TOTAL PLASMIN AND THE TRYPSIN INHIBITOR WERE TITRATED SEPARATELY IN SAMPLES OF SERUM TAKEN AT WEEKLY INTERVALS FROM THREE DIFFERENT GROUPS OF SCARLET FEVER PATIENTS: (a) those who did not develop any complications, (b) those who developed purulent complications, and (c) those who developed rheumatic fever. When these determinations were plotted, it was found that the resulting curves showed...

The proteolytic processing of Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) has been linked to sphingolipid-cholesterol microdomains (rafts). However, the raft proteases that may be involved in APP cleavage have not yet been identified. In this work we present evidence that the protease plasmin is restricted to rafts of cultured hippocampal neurons. We also show that plasmin increases the processing of human...

Plasma levels of alpha 2-plasmin inhibitor (alpha 2PI), plasmin-alpha 2PI complex and cross-linked fibrin derivatives (XDP) were measured in 8 patients (12 episodes) with thromboembolic disorders on the initial administration of urokinase. In conjunction with a decrease in plasma alpha 2PI activity and antigen, plasmin-alpha 2PI complex increased following urokinase infusion in all cases except...

Plasmin and urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) are ubiquitous proteases regulating the extracellular environment. They can activate each other via proteolytic cleavage, suggesting the potential for complex dynamic behaviors that could be elucidated by computational modeling. Ordinary differential equations are constructed to model the activation dynamics of plasminogen into plasmin, and...