BACKGROUND AND AIM Trace elements and vitamins play a vital role in human body to perform its function properly. Thalassemic patients are at risk of micronutrient deficiency. This study estimated levels of vitamins A, C, E, B12, folic acid, total homocysteine (tHcy), and methylmalonic acid (MMA) along with trace elements, zinc, copper, and selenium in Beta-thalassemia-major patients. METHODS ...

Sleep apnoea syndrome (SAS) is a known risk factor for vascular diseases and stroke. Structural brain damage, manifesting as an overt neurological deficit or more subtly as cognitive dysfunction, is a frequent symptom in SAS. The presence of a biochemical marker of cerebral injury would be of great benefit in SAS to screen for even small brain damage and to monitor efficiacy of therapy. Therefo...

It was found that the partially purified beta-ketoacyl-ACP synthase of Bacillus insolitus did not require the addition of FabD (malonyl-CoA:ACP transacylase, MAT) for the activity assay. This study therefore examined the necessity of FabD protein for in vitro branched-chain fatty acid (BCFA) biosynthesis by crude fatty acid synthetases (FAS) of Bacilli. To discover the involvement of FabD in th...

Background: The canonical Wnt signal transduction (or the Wnt/β-catenin pathway) plays a crucial role in the development of animals and in carcinogenesis. Beta-catenin is the central component of this signaling pathway. The activation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling results in the cytoplasmic and nuclear accumulation of β-catenin. In the nucleus, β-catenin interacts with the TCF/LEF transcription fa...

Vacuoles were prepared from endosperm tissue of 4-day-old castor bean seedlings (Ricinus communis var. Hale) and purified on a stepped sucrose gradient. It was shown by assays of marker enzymes that there was only trace contamination of the final preparation by other organelles (mitochondria, glyoxysomes, nuclei, spherosomes, and plastids) and by cytoplasmic components. Hydrolytic enzymes (acid...

Pseudoparaproteins were observed in 129 (10.5%) of 1,229 high resolution protein electrophoretic fractionations of serum (N = 847), urine (N = 368), or cerebrospinal fluid (N = 14) performed in this laboratory during a 12-month period. The pseudoparaproteins identified in serum electrophoretic patterns included fibrinogen, C-reactive protein, hemoglobin-haptoglobin complex, elevated beta-globul...

The minima hopping algorithm (MHOP) to find global minima on potential energy surfaces is used for protein structure prediction. The energy surface of the protein is represented with an all-atom OPLS force field and an implicit free energy solvation term. The system we studied here is the small 10-residue beta-hairpin mini-protein, chignolin. Starting from a completely extended structure, we fo...