PTEN induced kinase 1 (PINK1) is a serine/threonine kinase in the outer membrane of mitochondria (OMM), and known as a responsible gene of Parkinson's disease (PD). The precursor of PINK1 is synthesized in the cytosol and then imported into the mitochondria via the translocase of the OMM (TOM) complex. However, a large part of PINK1 import mechanism remains unclear. In this study, we examined u...

The nuclear import system is highly conserved among eukaryotes. Here we report the effects of a conditional mutation in SRP1, which encodes a Saccharomyces cerevisiae homolog of the vertebrate nuclear import receptor importin. Importin was isolated as a factor required for the initial targeting step of a nuclear import substrate to the nuclear envelope in a mammalian in vitro assay. We show tha...

Zellweger syndrome, neonatal adrenoleukodystrophy, infantile Refsum's disease, and classical rhizomelic chondrodysplasia punctata are lethal genetic disorders caused by defects in peroxisome biogenesis. We report here a characterization of the peroxisomal matrix protein import capabilities of fibroblasts from 62 of these peroxisome biogenesis disorder patients representing all ten known complem...

Mutations in the peroxisome targeting signal (PTS) 1 receptor gene, PEX5 , are responsible for complementation group (CG) 2 of the peroxisome biogenesis disorders (PBD). Of the two reported patients in this CG, cells from PBD018 (homozygous for the missense mutation N489K) are defective in the import of PTS1 proteins into peroxisomes, as expected. However, cells from PBD005 (homozygous for the ...

BACKGROUND Proteins generally enter or exit the nucleus as cargo of one of a small family of import and export receptors. These receptors bear distant homology to importin beta, a subunit of the receptor for proteins with classical nuclear localisation sequences (NLSs). To understand the mechanism of nuclear transport, the next question involves identifying the nuclear pore proteins that intera...

The present paper deals with the semantics of all, some and not in English and related languages. Since these semantics imply a logic, it also deals with the logic of quantification in natural language. To the extent that the linguistic findings are universally valid, the results are relevant to the study of human cognition in general. Since standard quantification theory (SQT) replaced Aristot...

Mitochondria import hundreds of different precursor proteins from the cytosol. More than 50% of mitochondrial proteins do not use the classical import pathway that is guided by amino-terminal presequences, but instead contain different types of internal targeting signals. Recent studies have revealed an unexpected complexity of the mitochondrial protein import machinery and have led to the disc...