Bai-Hu-Tang (BHT) has been broadly applied to treating the early stage of acute infection with systemic inflammation for two thousand years in Chinese medicine. We explore whether BHT is beneficial in treating sepsis and its effects on proinflammatory cytokine, interleukin-6, and anti-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-10, in which both play key roles in the progress of sepsis. Thirty-six male S...

The polyubiquitin receptor Rpn10 targets ubiquitylated Sic1 to the 26S proteasome for degradation. In contrast, turnover of at least one ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) substrate, CPY*, is impervious to deletion of RPN10. To distinguish whether RPN10 is involved in the turnover of only a small set of cell cycle regulators that includes Sic1 or plays a more general role in the UPS, we sought t...

Pex14p is a peroxisomal membrane protein that is involved in both peroxisome biogenesis and selective peroxisome degradation. Previously, we showed that Hansenula polymorpha Pex14p was phosphorylated in vivo. In this study, we identified its phosphorylation site by mass spectrometry. Recombinant His-tagged Pex14p (H6-Pex14p) was overexpressed and purified from the yeast. The protein band corres...

Supramolecular self-assembly offers promising new ways to control nanostructure morphology and respond to external stimuli. A pH-sensitive self-assembled system was developed to both control nanostructure shape and respond to the acidic microenvironment of tumors using self-assembling peptide amphiphiles (PAs). By incorporating an oligo-histidine H6 sequence, we developed two PAs that self-asse...

The cortisol response to surgery was studied in two groups of children one to eight years old during the first 24 hours after lower abdominal or peripheral surgery. The children were randomly allocated to a control (C) group (n = 6) or an epidural (E) group (n = 7). In Group C, surgery was performed under general anaesthesia and postoperative pain relief was achieved by using non-narcotic analg...

Multiproduct terpene synthases TPS4-B73 and TPS5-Delprim from maize (Zea mays) catalyze the conversion of farnesyl diphosphate (FDP) and geranyl diphosphate (GDP) into a complex mixture of sesquiterpenes and monoterpenes, respectively. Various isotopic and geometric isomers of natural substrates like (2Z)-[2-(2)H]- and [2,4,4,9,9,9-(2)H6]-(GDP) and (2Z,6E)-[2-(2)H]- and [2,4,4,13,13,13-(2)H6]-(...

Accumulated studies have suggested that mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) play a pivotal role in the development of cerebral hypoxic preconditioning (HPC). By using our "auto-hypoxia"-induced HPC mouse model, we have reported increased phosphorylation level of p38 MAPK, and decreased phosphorylation and protein expression levels of extracellular signal regulated kinases 1/2 (ERK1/2) in th...

Studying natural variation in rice resistance genes of cultivated and wild rice relatives can predict resistance stability to rice blast fungus. In the present study, the protein coding regions of the rice R gene Pi-d2 in 35 rice accessions, including Oryza sativa L. subsp. indica Kato (Aus), indica (IND), temperate japonica (TEJ), tropical japonica (TRJ), aromatic (ARO); subgroups of Oryza sat...

A novel actinobacterial strain, YIM ART06T, was isolated from a rock sample of karst cave located at Guizhou province, south-west China, and was characterized by a polyphasic taxonomic approach. The morphological and chemotaxonomic properties of strain YIM ART06T were in accordance with those of the genus Stackebrandtia. The 16S rRNA gene sequence of strain YIM ART06T showed highest similarity ...