Background & Aims: Many neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson and Huntington diseases are associated with the deposition proteinaceous aggregates known as amyloid fibrils. Currently, there is no approved therapeutic agent for inhibition of fibrillar assemblies. One important approach in the development of therapeutic agents is the use of herbal extracts. At the present com...

The structural and dynamic consequence of alterations in membrane lipid composition (specifically cholesterol) in neuronal membranes is poorly understood. Previous work from our laboratory has established bovine hippocampal membranes as a convenient natural source for studying neuronal receptors. In this paper, we have explored the role of cholesterol and proteins in the dynamics and heterogene...

The kinetics of actin unfolding induced by guanidine hydrochloride has been studied. On the basis of obtained experimental data a new kinetic pathway of actin unfolding was proposed. We have shown that the transition from native to inactivated actin induced by guanidine hydrochloride (GdnHCl) passes through essential unfolding of the protein. This means that inactivated actin should be consider...

Removal of the tightly bound Ca2+ ion from bovine a-lactalbumin (Hiraoka et al. (1980) Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun. 95, 1098-1104) produces a pronounced conformational change, as indicated by fluorescence and absorbance changes. These changes closely resemble the changes that occur on acid denaturation of the native protein. The binding of ions to apo-a-lactalbumin at pH 7.4 has been examined...

is a new fluorescent thymidine mimic composed of 2'-deoxyuridine fused to dimethylaniline. exhibits the same pKa and base pairing characteristics as native thymidine residues, and its fluorescence properties are highly sensitive to nucleobase ionization, base pairing and metal binding.

Two lines of evidence for the existence of DNA in the pellicle of Paramecium are presented: fluorescence staining and autoradiography. The latter shows deoxyribonuclease-sensitive incorporation of tritiated thymidine in or near the kineties. Fluorescence microscopy permits the localization of DNA at the site of kinetosomes. The possibility that the DNA is not native to the pellicle but introduc...

Tyrosine fluorescence in native proteins is known to be effectively quenched, whereas its emission increases upon proteins' unfolding. This suggests that tyrosine fluorescence could be exploited for probing structural rearrangements of proteins in addition to the extensively used tryptophan emission. We studied the possibility of using tyrosine fluorescence as an indicator of surfactant-induced...