A model is presented for deletion mutations whose formation is mediated by palindromic and quasipalindromic DNA sequences. It proposes that the self-complementarity of palindromes allows the formation of DNA secondary structures that serve as deletion intermediates. The structures juxtapose the end points of the deletion and thus direct deletion specificity. While misaligned DNA intermediates t...

Ferritins are 24-mer proteins which store and detoxify intracellular iron. Mammalian ferritins are made of two subunit types, the H- and L-chains, with different functional specificity. The H-chain has a metal-binding site (the ferroxidase center) which confers ferroxidase activity to the protein and accelerates iron incorporation. In the L-chain the center is substituted by a salt bridge. We p...

The assembly of enzyme components into the cellulosome complex is dictated by the cohesin-dockerin interaction. In a recent article (Mechaly, A., Yaron, S., Lamed, R., Fierobe, H.-P., Belaich, A., Belaich, J.-P., Shoham, Y., and Bayer, E. A. (2000) Proteins 39, 170-177), we provided experimental evidence that four previously predicted dockerin residues play a decisive role in the specificity of...

background: splicing by overlap extension (soe) pcr is used to create mutation in the coding sequence of an enzyme in order to study the role of specific residues in protein’s structure and function.objectives: we introduced a nested-soe-pcr (n –soe-pcr) in order to increase the specificity and generating mutations in a gene by soe-pcr.  materials and methods: genomic dna from bacillus thermoca...

Thermostable chitinases are useful for industrial and biotechnological applications. This paper reports the stabilization of chitinase from Serratia marcescens B4A through rational mutagenesis. Changing of Ser 390 to Ile in S. marcescens. The stabilization was enhanced through entropic stabilization by reduction of the loop length and also by increasing of the beta chain length. With this repla...

Mutagenesis drives natural selection. In the lab, mutations allow gene function to be deciphered. C. elegans is highly amendable to functional genetics because of its short generation time, ease of use, and wealth of available gene-alteration techniques. Here we provide an overview of historical and contemporary methods for mutagenesis in C. elegans, and discuss principles and strategies for fo...