BACKGROUND Spider silk is a tear-resistant and elastic biopolymer that has outstanding mechanical properties. Additionally, exiguous immunogenicity is anticipated for spider silks. Therefore, spider silk represents a potential ideal biomaterial for medical applications. All known spider silk proteins, so-called spidroins, reveal a composite nature of silk-specific units, allowing the recombinan...

PURPOSE Undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma (UPS) is defined as a sarcoma with cellular pleomorphism and no identifiable line of differentiation. It is typically a high-grade lesion with a metastatic rate of about one third. No tumor-specific rearrangement has been identified, and genetic markers that could be used for treatment stratification are lacking. We performed transcriptome sequencing...

The sensitivity of an elastin-like polypeptide (ELP) to environmental stimuli is used to reversibly immobilize a fusion partner, thioredoxin (TRX), onto a hydrophobic surface. An ELP, fused to TRX at its C-terminus, adsorbs onto a hydrophobic self-assembled monolayer (SAM) on gold above its inverse phase transition temperature (Tc) and is resolubilized from the surface when the solution tempera...

We used a new approach called panhandle polymerase chain sequence tags. MaLR sequences have not been found before near leukemia-associated translocation breakpoints. The reaction (PCR) to clone an MLL genomic translocation breakpoint in a case of acute lymphoblastic leukemia of innonrepetitive sequences were not homologous to known partner genes of MLL. Screening of somatic cell hybrid and fanc...

Chromosomal rearrangements of the 11p15 locus have been identified in hematopoietic malignancies, resulting in translocations involving the N-terminal portion of the nucleoporin gene NUP98. Fifteen different fusion partner genes have been identified for NUP98, and more than one half of these are homeobox transcription factors. By contrast, the NUP98 fusion partner in t(11;20) is Topoisomerase I...

We used a new approach called panhandle polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to clone an MLL genomic translocation breakpoint in a case of acute lymphoblastic leukemia of infancy in which karyotype analysis was technically unsuccessful and did not show the translocation partner. Panhandle PCR amplified known MLL sequence 5' of the breakpoint and 3' sequence from the unknown partner gene from a DNA t...

The nucleoporin gene, NUP98, has been reported to be fused to seven partner genes in hematological malignancies with 11p15 translocations. We report here a novel NUP98 partner gene, HOXD11, not HOXD13, in a pediatric patient with de novo AML having t(2;11)(q31;p15), using a cDNA panhandle PCR. The HOXD11 gene is one of the HOXD cluster genes and contains 2 exons, encoding a protein of 338 amino...

We have developed and tested a simple and efficient protein purification method for biophysical screening of proteins and protein fragments by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and optical methods, such as circular dichroism spectroscopy. The method constitutes an extension of previously described protocols for gene expression and protein solubility screening [M. Hammarström et al., (2002), Prot...

Most lipomas are characterized by translocations involving the HMGA2 gene in 12q14.3. These rearrangements lead to the fusion of HMGA2 with an ectopic sequence from the translocation chromosome partner. Only five fusion partners of HMGA2 have been identified in lipomas so far. The identification of novel fusion partners of HMGA2 is important not only for diagnosis in soft tissue tumors but also...

We have cloned a fusion partner of the MLL gene at 11q23 and identified it as the gene encoding the human formin-binding protein 17, FBP17. It maps to chromosome 9q34 centromeric to ABL. The gene fusion results from a complex chromosome rearrangement that was resolved by fluorescence in situ hybridization with various probes on chromosomes 9 and 11 as an ins(11;9)(q23;q34)inv(11)(q13q23). The r...