The viability of vertebrate cells depends on a complex signaling interplay between survival factors and cell-death effectors. Subtle changes in the equilibrium between these regulators can result in abnormal cell proliferation or cell death, leading to various pathological manifestations. Death-associated protein kinase (DAPK) is a multidomain calcium/calmodulin (CaM)-dependent Ser/Thr protein ...

Ribosomal S6 kinases (RSK) play important roles in cell signaling through the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. Each of the four RSK isoforms (RSK1-4) is a single polypeptide chain containing two kinase domains connected by a linker sequence with regulatory phosphorylation sites. Here, we demonstrate that full-length RSK2-which is implicated in several types of cancer, and which ...

FVIIa binding to tissue factor (TF) and subsequent signal transduction have now been implicated in a variety of pathophysiological processes, including cytokine production during sepsis, tumor angiogenesis and neoangiogenesis, and leukocyte diapedesis. The molecular details, however, by which FVIIa/TF affects gene expression and cellular physiology, remain obscure. Here we show that FVIIa induc...

Protein kinase inhibitors frequently have interesting effects that cannot be fully ascribed to the intended target kinase(s) but identifying additional targets that might explain the effects is not straightforward. By comparing two different inhibitors of the Rsk (p90 ribosomal S6 kinase) kinases, we found that the increasingly used compound BI-D1870 had biological effects in murine DCs (dendri...

Vitamin A (retinol) is essential for normal regulation of cell growth and differentiation. We have shown that the retinol metabolite retinoic acid (RA) induces mucous cell differentiation of normal human tracheobronchial epithelial (NHTBE) cells. However, early biological effects of RA in the differentiation of bronchial epithelia are largely unknown. Here, we showed that RA rapidly activated c...

OBJECTIVES To produce an effective recombinant streptokinase (rSK) from pathogenic Streptococcus pyogenes isolate in yeast, and evaluate its potential for thrombolytic therapy. METHODS This study was conducted from November 2012 to December 2013 at King Khalid University, Abha, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Throat swabs collected from 45 pharyngitis patients in Asser Central Hospital, Abha, ...

Friction and wear tests were performed on AISI 1045 steel specimens with different initial roughness parameters, machined by a creep-feed dry grinding process, to study the friction and wear behavior on a pin-on-disc tester in dry sliding conditions. Average surface roughness (Ra), root mean square (Rq), skewness (Rsk) and kurtosis (Rku) were involved in order to analyse the influence of the fr...

We prove a formula for the number of permutations in Sn such that their first n− k entries are increasing and their longest increasing subsequence has length n− k. This formula first appeared as a consequence of character polynomial calculations in recent work of Adriano Garsia and Alain Goupil. We give two ‘elementary’ bijective proofs of this result and of its q-analogue, one proof using the ...

Most dendritic cell (DC) responses to Toll-like receptor (TLR) ligands depend on the activation of mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs), but the contributions of the many MAPK-activated kinases (MKs) that act ‘downstream’ of the MAPKs Erk and p38 are not known. Here we sought to determine which MKs are required for acute TLR-driven, MAPK-dependent DC endocytic responses. Two specific and s...