Intrinsically disordered regions have been associated with various cellular processes and are implicated in several human diseases, but their exact roles remain unclear. We previously defined two classes of conserved disordered regions in budding yeast, referred to as "flexible" and "constrained" conserved disorder. In flexible disorder, the property of disorder has been positionally conserved ...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Epitope-based vaccines (EVs) are specific, safe and easy to produce. However, vaccine failure has been frequently reported due to variation within epitopic regions. Therefore, development of vaccines based on conserved epitopes may prevent such vaccine failure. This study was undertaken to identify highly conserved antigenic regions in the four dengue serotypes to produc...

Regulation of tyrosine hydroxylase gene (Th) transcription is critical for specifying and maintaining the dopaminergic neuronal phenotype. Here we define a molecular regulatory mechanism for Th transcription conserved in tetrapod vertebrates. We show that heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein (hnRNP) K is a transactivator of Th transcription. It binds to previously unreported and evolutionari...

SUMMARY ConFind (conserved region finder) identifies regions of conservation in multiple sequence alignments that can serve as diagnostic targets. Designed to work with a large number of closely related, highly variable sequences, ConFind provides robust handling of alignments containing partial sequences and ambiguous characters. Conserved regions are defined in terms of minimum region length,...

We have sequenced the major noncoding region of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of four Japanese monkeys and have found length polymorphism in the sequenced region. The length polymorphism resulted from two tandem duplications of 160-bp sequences which contained the conserved sequence blocks 2 and 3 and the light-strand transcription-promoter region. We also found polymorphisms in this mtDNA region a...

A 47-base-pair (bp) conserved sequence in the 5'-flanking regions of three transcriptional units coding for nodulation functions (nodABC, nodEFG, and nodH) has been identified in Rhizobium meliloti strain 41. The conserved region contains subsequences of 7 bp, 5 bp, and 25 bp. The conserved 25-bp sequence was synthesized and used as a hybridization probe; three additional copies of the sequence...

Some plant microRNAs have been shown to be de novo generated by inverted duplication from their target genes. Subsequent duplication events potentially generate multigene microRNA families. Within this article we provide supportive evidence for the inverted duplication model of plant microRNA evolution. First, we report that the precursors of four Arabidopsis thaliana microRNA families, miR157,...

Protamines are small arginine-rich proteins that package DNA in spermatozoa. The mouse protamine 1 (Prm-1) gene is transcribed exclusively in post-meiotic spermatids. To identify elements in the Prm-1 promoter required for spermatid-specific transcription, we generated transgenic mice by microinjection of transgenes containing Prm-1 5' flanking sequences with 5' truncations or internal deletion...

Bacterial small RNAs (sRNAs) are a class of structural RNAs that often regulate mRNA targets via post-transcriptional base pair interactions. In this study, we assessed the accessibility and conservation of the interaction sites and the influence of these features on genome-wide target predictions. For this purpose, we compiled a set of 71 experimentally verified sRNA-target pairs from Escheric...

Intracellular juxtamembrane regions of transmembrane proteins play pivotal roles in cell signalling, mediated by protein-protein interactions. Disordered protein regions, and short conserved motifs within them, are emerging as key determinants of many such interactions. Here, we investigated whether disorder and conserved motifs are enriched in the juxtamembrane area of human single-pass transm...