Ageing is accompanied by a progressive loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength, leading to the loss of functional capacity and an increased risk for developing chronic metabolic diseases such as diabetes. The age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass results from a chronic disruption in the balance between muscle protein synthesis and degradation. As basal muscle protein synthesis rates are li...

Retroviruses are the causative agents of serious diseases, such as acquired immunodeficiency syndromes and several cancers, and are also useful gene therapy vectors. Retroviruses contain two sense-strand RNA genomes, which become linked at their 5¢ ends to form an RNA dimer. Understanding the molecular basis for dimerization may yield new approaches for controlling viral infectivity. Because th...

To accurately predict the modifications done during metabolic processes by cytochrome P450 (P450) 3A enzyme, selecting substrates that best represent a broad range of substrate substitutions and that follow the Michaelis-Menten kinetic properties is highly necessary. In the present study, the oxidative pathways of deoxyschizandrin (DS), the most abundant lignan in Fructus Schisandrae fruit extr...

We report a highly specific, robust and rapid new method for labeling cell surface proteins with biophysical probes. The method uses the Escherichia coli enzyme biotin ligase (BirA), which sequence-specifically ligates biotin to a 15-amino-acid acceptor peptide (AP). We report that BirA also accepts a ketone isostere of biotin as a cofactor, ligating this probe to the AP with similar kinetics a...

Cryptosporidium and Giardia are two important pathogenic parasites that have caused many waterborne outbreaks which affected hundreds of thousands of people. Contamination from effluent discharged by sewage treatment plants have been implicated in previous waterborne outbreaks of Cryptosporidium and Giardia. This study evaluated the reduction of Cryptosporidium and Giardia (oo)cysts in two sewa...

Rapamycin is a canonical allosteric inhibitor of the mammalian tarpet of rapamycin (mTOR) kinase with immunosuppressive and proapoptotic activities. We found that in vitro rapamycin also regulates the proteasome, which is an essential intracellular protease of the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. Rapamycin inhibits proteinase and selected peptidase activities of the catalytic core proteasome at lo...

The objective of the present study is to investigate the relationship between the lesion characteristics of coronary artery and risk factors of coronary heart disease (CHD). A total of 430 patients underwent coronary angiography (CAG) were recruited from January 2008 to October 2009 and divided into CHD group (n=282) and non-CHD group (control group, n=148) according to the findings on CAG. The...