background: in gene therapy, the use of rna molecules as therapeutic agents has shown advantages over plasmid dna, including higher levels of safety. however, transient nature of rna has been a major obstacle in application of rna in gene therapy. methods: here, we used the internal ribosomal entry site of encephalomyocarditis virus and the 3’ non-translated region of poliovirus to design an en...

Noninvasive reporter gene imaging is a component of molecular imaging. Reporter imaging can provide noninvasive assessments of endogenous biologic processes in living subjects and can be performed using different imaging modalities. This review will focus on radionuclide-based reporter gene imaging as developed and applied in preclinical and clinical studies. Examples of different reporter syst...

It remains a challenge to establish a straightforward genetic approach for controlling the probability of gene activation or knockout at a desired level. Here, we developed a method termed STARS: stochastic gene activation with genetically regulated sparseness. The stochastic expression was achieved by two cross-linked, mutually-exclusive Cre-mediated recombinations. The stochastic level was fu...

In Drosophila, bacterial challenge induces the rapid transcription of several genes encoding potent antibacterial peptides. The upstream sequences of the diptericin and cecropin Al genes, which have been investigated in detail, contain two, respectively one sequence element homologous to the binding site of the mammalian nuclear factor kappaB. These elements have been shown to be mandatory for ...

Four new sesquiterpenes, sinularianins C-F (3-6), together with known sinularianins A (1) and B (2) were identified from a South China Sea soft coral Sinularia sp. Compounds 1-6 were evaluated for inhibition of NF-κB activation using the cell-based HEK293 NF-κB luciferase reporter gene assay. Compounds 1 and 4 were exhibited a potent effect with inhibitory rates of 41.3% and 43.0% at the concen...