Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) plays a central role in the regulation of the immune response. HLA class II molecules are essential for T cell-mediated adaptive immunity and present peptide antigens to CD4(+) T cells. Because of its important role in the immune response and its high degree of polymorphism, the HLA system is associated with many diseases. We examined the polymorphisms of HLA-DRB a...

The tumor suppressor p53 is a nucleocytoplasmic shuttling protein that accumulates in the nucleus of cells exposed to various cellular stresses. One important role of nuclear p53 is to mobilize a stress response by transactivating target genes such as the p21(Waf1) gene. In this study, we investigated more closely the localization of p53 in cells following various stresses. Immunocytochemistry ...

BACKGROUND Although inflammation in Crohn's disease is believed to be mediated by activated T cells, genotyping of all MHC class II alleles in white people with this disease has not been reported. AIMS To perform a detailed molecular analysis of HLA DPB, DQB, and DRB genes in white patients with Crohn's disease and controls in order to determine if the inheritance of any class II genes confer...

This report describes the design of the eplet version of HLAMatchmaker to determine class II compatibility at the structural level. This matching algorithm is based on the hypothesis, developed from molecular modeling of crystallized antigen-antibody complexes, that functional epitopes are represented by patches of surface-exposed nonself-amino acid residues surrounded by residues within a 3-A ...

Cellular messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are associated to proteins in the form of ribonucleoprotein particles. The double-stranded RNA-binding (DRB) proteins play important roles in mRNA synthesis, modification, activity and decay. Staufen is a DRB protein involved in the localized translation of specific mRNAs during Drosophila early development. The human Staufen1 (hStau1) forms RNA granules that con...

In each bead of the nucleolar necklace, using adenosine analog DRB-treated PtK1 cells, we investigated the three components of rDNA transcription, i.e. the gene, transcription factor UBF and transcripts. In situ hybridization revealed the unraveling and 3-D dispersion of most of the rDNA coding sequences within the nucleus. The signals were small, of similar intensity and tandemly organized in ...

Plants contain more DICER-LIKE (DCL) enzymes and double-stranded RNA binding (DRB) proteins than other eukaryotes, resulting in increased small RNA network complexities. Analyses of single, double, triple and quadruple dcl mutants exposed DCL1 as a sophisticated enzyme capable of producing both microRNAs (miRNAs) and siRNAs, unlike the three other DCLs, which only produce siRNAs. Depletion of s...

Little is known about the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) in the genome of Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis) (YFP) or other cetaceans. In this study, a high-quality YFP bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) library was constructed. We then determined the organization and characterization of YFP MHC class II region by screening the BAC library, followe...

The human carcinoma-derived cell line Calu-6 has previously been demonstrated to endogenously express human renin (hREN) mRNA and to markedly increase steady-state hREN mRNA levels (100-fold after 24 hours) in response to analogues of cAMP and postreceptor activators of adenylyl cyclase such as forskolin. However, both transfection analysis using hREN promoter-reporter constructs and nuclear ru...

InfiniBand (IBA) technology was developed to address the performance issues associated with messages movement among Endnodes and computer I/O devices. However, InfiniBand is also widely deployed within high performance computing (HPC) clusters due to the high bandwidth and low message latency attributes it offers to inter-processor communication systems. An interconnection-network efficient des...