Recent studies have demonstrated the important role of immune molecules in the development of neuronal circuitry and synaptic plasticity. We have detected the presence of FcγRllB protein in parvalbumin-containing inhibitory interneurons (PV neurons). In the present study, we examined the appearance of PV neurons in the barrel cortex and the effect of sensory deprivation in FcγRllB-deficient mic...

A morphological, immunohistochemical and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) study was performed on eight ewes experimentally infected with an Italian strain of Maedi-Visna Virus (MVV) in order to evaluate the lesions and the viral distribution after three years of infection. At the moment of euthanasia, seven sheep were seropositive for MVV, while one sheep in poor body conditions was seronegative...

BACKGROUND Neonatal intermittent hyperoxia-hypoxia (IHH) is involved in the pathogenesis of retinopathy of prematurity. Whether similar oxygen fluctuations will create pathological changes in the grey and white matter of the brain is unknown. METHODS From birth until postnatal day 14 (P14), two litters (total n = 22) were reared in IHH: hyperoxia (50% O2) interrupted by three consecutive two-...

In the developing mouse retina, spontaneous and light-driven activity shapes bipolar→ganglion cell glutamatergic synapse formation, beginning around the time of eye-opening (P12-P14) and extending through the first postnatal month. During this time, glutamate release can spill outside the synaptic cleft and possibly stimulate extrasynaptic NMDA-type glutamate receptors (NMDARs) on ganglion cell...

Cell lines obtained by in vitro transformation of bone marrow with Abelson murine leukemia virus (A-MuLV) can be divided into three classes: producers, releasing reverse transcriptase-containing particles and infectious virus; nonproducers, releasing no viral particles; and defective producers, the most common phenotype, releasing particulate reverse transcriptase in the absence of infectious v...

Low reorganization free energies are necessary for fast electron transfer (ET) reactions. Hence, rational design of redox proteins with lower reorganization free energies has been a long-standing challenge, promising to yield a deeper understanding of the underlying principles of ET reactivity and to enable potential applications in different energy conversion systems. Herein we report studies ...

The rack-induced bonding mechanism of metals to proteins is a useful concept for explaining the generation of metal sites in electron transfer proteins, such as the blue copper proteins, that are designed for rapid electron transfer. The trigonal pyramidal structure imposed by the protein with three strong equatorial ligands (one Cys and two His) provides a favorable geometry for both cuprous a...

Azurin from Pseudomonas aeruginosa and two mutants where the methionine ligand has been mutated have been studied in order to directly investigate the functional and structural significance of this ligand in the blue copper proteins. Reduction potentials, X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS), electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), and optical spectra are obtained in an attempt to provide a di...

The same non-covalent interactions previously found to affect the redox potential (E(m)) of the mononuclear T1 Cu protein azurin (Az) are shown to also fine-tune the E(m) of the dinuclear Cu(A) center in the same Az protein scaffold. The effects of these mutations are in the same direction but with smaller magnitude in the Cu(A) site, due to dissipation of the effects by the dinuclear Cu(A) cen...

The interaction between the solute and the solsent molecules play a crucial role in understanding the various molecular processes involved in chemistry and biochemistry, so in this work the potential energy of active site of azurin have been calculated in solvent by the Monte Carlo simulation. In this paper we present quantitative results of Monte Carlo calculations of potential energies of ...