During active disease, patients with systemic-onset juvenile chronic arthritis (S-JCA) demonstrate a rise and fall in serum interleukin-6 (IL-6) that parallels the classic quotidian fever. To investigate the possibility that this cytokine profile results from a difference in the control of IL-6 expression, we examined the 5' flanking region of the IL-6 gene for polymorphisms. A G/C polymorphism...

The human low affinity receptors for the Fc domain of immunoglobulin G, Fc gamma RIII, are encoded by two genes (IIIA and IIIB) which share >95% sequence identity in both coding and flanking sequences. Despite this extraordinary sequence conservation, IIIA is expressed in natural killer (NK) cells and macrophages and is absent in neutrophils, whereas IIIB is expressed only in neutrophils. To de...

During vertebrate embryogenesis, presomitic mesoderm cells enter a segmental program to generate somite, a process termed somitogenesis. Mespo, a member of the bHLH transcription factor family, plays important roles in this process. However, how Mespo expression is regulated remains unclear. To address this question, we isolated a genomic DNA sequence containing 4317 bp of Mespo 5' flanking reg...

Protein-coding and non-coding RNA transcripts perform a wide variety of cellular functions in diverse organisms. Several of their functional roles are expressed and modulated via RNA structure. A given transcript, however, can have more than a single functional RNA structure throughout its life, a fact which has been previously overlooked. Transient RNA structures, for example, are only present...

The complete structure of a quail fast skeletal muscle troponin I gene was determined by nucleotide sequence comparison of troponin I genomic and cDNA sequences. This 4.5-kilobase troponin I gene has eight exons. The actin-binding domain of troponin I is encoded by a single exon, whereas the troponin C-binding domain is split into at least two exons. The exon organization of the fast troponin I...

We have investigated the functional relationship between two proteins involved in the photosensory system of the archaeon Halobacterium salinarium: the photoreceptor sensory rhodopsin I (SRI) and the halobacterial transducer rhodopsin I (HtrI), which has been proposed to be the putative signal transducer of SRI, by genomic DNA analysis of two independent SRI negative mutants, Pho81 and D1. Sout...

To understand the mechanism underlying the regulation of the Ca-binding protein regucalcin gene expression, we characterized the 5*-flanking region of the rat regucalcin gene. The transcriptional start site of the rat regucalcin gene was determined by the cap site hunting method with rat liver cap site cDNA. The 5*-flanking region of the rat regucalcin gene ligated to a luciferase reporter gene...