The c-myb proto-oncogene product (c-Myb) can transactivate the human hsp70 promoter in a transient cotransfection assay. The present studies have demonstrated that the heat shock element (HSE) in the hsp70 promoter mediates trans-activation by c-Myb. Mutagenesis of the DNA sequence in HSE indicated that the NGAAN motif is necessary for not only the heat shock response but also the c-Myb-induced...

BACKGROUND It is controversial whether surgical zipper technique (SZT), a non-invasive method of surgical wound closure, achieves a better outcome of incision healing than intracutaneous sutures (IS) in the surgery. This meta-analysis was performed to systematically analyze whether surgical zipper is superior to suture material for the incision closure. METHODS Databases and reference lists w...

An adaptive massively parallel system for flexible information processing has been investigated. This research requires a feedback from the real application. In this paper, a parallel characteristic extraction from the protein sequence database is described. Since the protein sequence database is huge and sequences have variety, an adaptive massively parallel system is mandatory. An HMM (hidden...

C/EBPδ (CCAAT/enhancer-binding protein δ) is a member of the C/EBP family of nuclear proteins that function in the control of cell growth, survival, differentiation and apoptosis. We previously demonstrated that C/EBPδ gene transcription is highly induced in G0 growth-arrested mammary epithelial cells but the C/EBPδ protein exhibits a t1⁄2 of only ∼120 min. The goal of the present study was to ...

The cryptic high copy number plasmid pRN1 from the thermophilic and acidophilic crenarchaeote Sulfolobus islandicus shares three conserved open reading frames with other S.islandicus plasmids. One of the open reading frames, namely orf80, encodes a 9.5 kDa protein that has no homology to any characterised protein. Recombinant ORF80 purified from Escherichia coli binds to double-stranded DNA in ...

Wolbachia is an intracellular microbe found in a wide diversity of arthropod and filarial nematode hosts. In arthropods these common bacteria are reproductive parasites that manipulate central elements of their host's reproduction to increase their own maternal transmission in one of several ways. Cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) is one such manipulation where sperm are somehow modified in infe...

In this paper, we study the application of an HMM (hidden Markov model) to the problem of representing protein sequences by a stochastic motif. A stochastic protein motif represents the small segments of protein sequences that have a certain function or structure. The stochastic motif, represented by an HMM, has conditional probabilities to deal with the stochastic nature of the motif. This HMM...

The heptad repeat (HR), a conserved structural motif of class I viral fusion proteins, is responsible for the formation of a six-helix bundle structure during the envelope fusion process. The insect baculovirus F protein is a newly found budded virus envelope fusion protein which possesses common features to class I fusion proteins, such as proteolytic cleavage and the presence of an N-terminal...

Many retroviruses, including the human and simian immunodeficiency viruses, contain a leucine zipper-like repeat in a highly conserved region of the external domain of the transmembrane (TM) glycoprotein. This region has been postulated to play a role in stabilizing the oligomeric form of these molecules. To determine what role this region might play in envelope structure and function, several ...

Quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) were used to study zipper and layer-by-layer multilayer assemblies of artificial photosystems based on naphthalenediimides (NDIs) attached to an oligophenylethynyl (OPE-NDI) or p-oligophenyl (POP-NDI) backbone in dry and wet state. For the most interesting OPE-NDI zipper, one obtains for the dry film a monolayer thickness of ...