BACKGROUND Several intracellular pathogens, including Listeria monocytogenes, use components of the host actin-based cytoskeleton for intracellular movement and for cell-to-cell spread. These bacterial systems provide relatively simple model systems with which to study actin-based motility. Genetic analysis of L. monocytogenes led to the identification of the 90 kD surface-bound ActA polypeptid...

Acta Crystallographica Section C was pleased to be able to publish its first virtual special issue at the beginning of December, 2011. The issue focussed on polymorphism (http://

ActA is a bacterially encoded protein that enables Listeria monocytogenes to hijack the host cell actin cytoskeleton. It promotes Arp2/3-dependent actin nucleation, but its interactions with cellular components of the nucleation machinery are not well understood. Here we show that two domains of ActA (residues 85-104 and 121-138) with sequence similarity to WASP homology 2 domains bind two acti...

Activin A (ActA)/follistatin (FST) signaling has been shown to be deregulated in different tumor types including lung adenocarcinoma (LADC). Here, we report that serum ActA protein levels are significantly elevated in LADC patients (n=64) as compared to controls (n=46, p=0.015). ActA levels also correlated with more advanced disease stage (p<0.0001) and T (p=0.0035) and N (p=0.0002) factors. M1...

The paper by Awan et al. [Acta Cryst. (2011), E67, m576-m577] is retracted. It has subsequently been shown that the crystal studied was an already known zinc compound, [Zn(4)Cl(4)(C(2)H(6)NS)(4)].

Participants switched between two randomly ordered discrimination tasks and each trial began with the presentation of a task cue instructing which task to execute. The authors induced phasic alertness by presenting a salient uninformative stimulus after the task cue was provided, and at variable intervals before the target stimulus was presented (Experiments 1-3) or before the task cue (Experim...

Transforming Growth Factor-beta (TGFb) and activin A (actA) are members of the TGFb superfamily and display overlapping biological activities, including the ability to promote the conversion of conventional CD4 T cells to regulatory T cells (Tregs). We have recently shown that in situ vaccination by local tumor irradiation is hindered by activation of latent TGFb (Vanpouille-Box et al., Cancer ...

The NIH Protein Structure Initiative centers, such as the Joint Center for Structural Genomics (JCSG), have developed highly efficient technological platforms that are capable of experimentally determining the three-dimensional structures of hundreds of proteins per year. However, the overwhelming majority of the almost 5000 protein structures determined by these centers have yet to be describe...

Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand 2004; 00: 1–2. # Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand 0

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