background: natural background radiation of a particular region is one of the distinctive factors defining the status of environment. eloor island is an industrial area in ernakulum district of the state of kerala, india. the indoor and outdoor gamma level measurements have been carried out for the region for evaluating the annual effective dose to the population residing in this area. material...

Whole cell biosensors (WCBs) have multiple applications for environmental monitoring, detecting a wide range of pollutants. WCBs depend critically on the sensitivity and specificity of the transcription factor (TF) used to detect the analyte. We describe the mechanism of regulation and the structural and biochemical properties of TF families that are used, or could be used, for the development ...

Figure 1 shows the survival of all patients treated in two consecutive periods at the HSC. Before 1972 patients received a variety of drugs; between 1972 and 1975 daunorubicin and cytosine arabinoside (araC) were used in induction, CNS prophylaxis was given with intrathecal chemotherapy and treatment continued . with 6-mercaptopurine or thioguanine for 2 years. There was no improvement in media...

Members of the AraC/XylS family of transcriptional regulators are usually organized in two domains: a conserved domain made up of 100 amino acids and frequently located at the C-terminal end, involved in DNA binding; and an N-terminal nonconserved domain involved in signal recognition, as is the case for regulators involved in the control of carbon metabolism (R. Tobes and J. L. Ramos, Nucleic ...

The arabinose operon promoter, pBAD, is negatively regulated in the absence of arabinose by AraC protein, which forms a DNA loop by binding to two sites separated by 210 base-pairs, araO2 and araI1. pBAD is also positively regulated by AraC-arabinose and the cyclic AMP receptor protein, CRP. We provide evidence that CRP breaks the araO2-araI1 repression loop in vitro. The ability of CRP to brea...

Infection of human cells with adenovirus 12 (Ad12), but not Ad2 or 5, induces four specific sites of metaphase chromosome fragility: the U1 small nuclear RNA (snRNA) genes (the RNU1 locus), the U2 snRNA genes (RNU2), the U1 snRNA pseudogenes (PSU1) and the 5S rRNA genes (RN5S). Significantly, each of these sites corresponds to a multigene family encoding a small, abundant structural RNA. We and...