The patients with Crohn's disease (CD) have a 'leaky gut' manifested by an increase in intestinal epithelial tight junction (TJ) permeability. Tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) is a proto-typical pro-inflammatory cytokine that plays a central role in intestinal inflammation of CD. An important pro-inflammatory action of TNF-alpha is to cause a functional opening of intestinal TJ barrier....

Variants in the precore (G(1896)A) and core promoter (A(1762)T, G(1764)A) regions of hepatitis B virus (HBV) may be related to serum HBV DNA levels and severity of liver disease. The aims of this nationwide study were to determine the prevalence of HBV precore/core promoter variants in the United States and the association between these variants and patient demographics, HBV genotypes, serum HB...

Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) contributes to the pathogenesis of both acute and chronic inflammatory diseases and has been a target for the development of new anti-inflammatory drugs. Shikonins, the naphthoquinone pigments present in the root tissues of Lithospermum erythrorhizon Sieb. et Zucc. (Boraginaceae), have been reported to exert anti-inflammatory effects both in vitro and in ...

BACKGROUND The full length Rad51 promoter is highly active in cancer cells but not in normal cells. We therefore set out to assess whether we could confer this tumor-selectivity to an adenovirus vector. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Expression of an adenovirally-vectored luciferase reporter gene from the Rad51 promoter was up to 50 fold higher in cancer cells than in normal cells. Further ev...

The pore-forming protein perforin is preferentially expressed in NK and cytotoxic T cells. To investigate the molecular regulation of human perforin gene transcription, the activity of the human perforin promoter was analyzed in human NK and T cell lines using various promoter fragments linked to a luciferase reporter gene. A core promoter was identified within 55 bp upstream of the transcripti...

The core promoter is the region in which RNA polymerase II is recruited to the DNA and acts to initiate transcription, but the extent to which the core promoter sequence determines promoter activity levels is largely unknown. Here, we identified several base content and k-mer sequence features of the yeast core promoter sequence that are highly predictive of maximal promoter activity. These fea...

Angiotensinogen is shown to be produced by the liver and the hepatoma cell line HepG2. As a first step for understanding the molecular relationship between the transcriptional regulation of the angiotensinogen gene and the pathogenesis of hypertension, we have analyzed the basal promoter of the angiotensinogen gene. Chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) assays with 5'-deleted constructs showe...