The dystrophin-glycoprotein complex (DGC) is a multisubunit complex that spans the muscle plasma membrane and forms a link between the F-actin cytoskeleton and the extracellular matrix. The proteins of the DGC are structurally organized into distinct subcomplexes, and genetic mutations in many individual components are manifested as muscular dystrophy. We recently identified a unique tetraspan-...

The role of the subelytral cavity in flightless beetle species as an adaptation to water saving in arid habitats is still in dispute. We found that relatively little CO(2) was released from the subelytral cavity of a large apterous beetle Circellium bacchus during simultaneous measurements of CO(2) emission from the anterior mesothoracic spiracles and posterior body, which included the subelytr...

c-di-GMP riboswitches are structured RNAs located in the 5'-untranslated regions (5'-UTRs) of mRNAs that regulate expression of downstream genes in response to changing concentrations of the second messenger c-di-GMP. We discovered three complete c-di-GMP riboswitches (Bc3, Bc4 and Bc5 RNA) with similar structures, which are arranged in tandem to constitute a triple-tandem (Bc3-5 RNA) riboswitc...

BACKGROUND Mutations in the E-cadherin (CDH1) gene are a well documented cause of hereditary diffuse gastric cancer (HDGC). Development of evidence based guidelines for CDH1 screening for HDGC have been complicated by its rarity, variable penetrance, and lack of founder mutations. METHODS Forty three new gastric cancer (GC) families were ascertained from multiple sources. In 42 of these famil...

Disruption of cytoskeletal organization caused by genetic defects in the components of the dystrophin-glycoprotein complex (DGC) results in muscular dystrophy and/or cardiomyopathy in human patients and animal models. Accumulating evidence obtained from studies by using skeletal muscle fibers, cultured myotubes, and cardiac muscle preparations from dystrophic animals suggest that defects in DGC...

Without the SNF-6 acetylcholine transporter (bottom) mutant muscles fall apart. K im /M ac m ill an they are mutant for various members of the dystrophinglycoprotein complex (DGC), which links intracellular actin to extracellular laminin. But now, Hongkyun Kim, Steven McIntire (University of California, San Francisco, CA), and colleagues suggest that loss of the DGC results in loss of an associ...

A wide variety of techniques for the preparation of sperm are currently available, of which the most commonly employed are density-gradient centrifugation (DGC) and swim-up (SUP). To date, these methods appear to be effective in selecting functional sperm for assisted reproduction techniques (ART), but they may have negative effects on sperm DNA. In this study, the ability of these semen proces...

Computational grids are heterogeneous, dynamic and distributed environments that enable large-scale sharing of resources within groups of individuals and/or institutions [9]. A grid environment collects a lot of information and information itself is a critical resource in computational grids, so it is necessary to well administrate it. A fundamental element in a grid infrastructure is the Infor...

Muscular dystrophies are genetically diverse but share common phenotypic features of muscle weakness, degeneration, and progressive decline in muscle function. Previous work has focused on understanding how disruptions in the dystrophin-glycoprotein complex result in muscular dystrophy, supporting a hypothesis that the muscle sarcolemma is fragile and susceptible to contraction-induced injury i...

This paper presents two clustering methods: the first one uses a density-based approach (DGC) and the second one uses a frequent itemset mining approach (FINN). DGC uses regulation information as well as order preserving ranking for identifying relevant clusters in gene expression data. FINN exploits the frequent itemsets and uses a nearest neighbour approach for clustering gene sets. Both the ...