An alternative treatment for staphylococcal infections caused by antibiotic-resistance strains is to lyse staphylococci with peptidoglycan hydrolases, for example, a cysteine, histidine-dependent amidohydrolase/peptidase (CHAP). Here, CHAPs were analyzed in 12 Staphylococcus aureus genomes and 44 staphylococcal phage genomes. There are 234 putative CHAP-containing proteins and only 64 non-ident...

Daidzein, a plant extract, has antioxidant activity. It is hypothesized, in this study, that daidzein exhibits neuroprotective effects on cerebral ischemia. Rat models of middle cerebral artery occlusion were intraperitoneally administered daidzein. Biochemical and immunohistochemical tests showed that superoxide dismutase and nuclear respiratory factor 1 expression levels in the brain tissue d...

Signal peptides of secretory and membrane proteins are generated by proteolytic processing of precursor proteins after insertion into the endoplasmic reticulum membrane. Liberated signal peptides can be further processed, and the resulting N-terminal fragments are released toward the cytosol, where they may interact with target proteins like calmodulin. We show here that the processing of signa...

A gene product with an apparent molecular mass of approximately 39,000 Da can be identified in the cytoplasmic membrane of Escherichia coli upon expression of cloned envC. In this communication we report that the product was labelled with [3H]glycerol and [3H]palmitic acid, and a precursor molecule of increased molecular mass was accumulated when cells were treated with globomycin, a specific i...

Extracellular serpins such as antithrombin and alpha1-antitrypsin are the quintessential regulators of proteolytic pathways. In contrast, the biological functions of the intracellular serpins remain obscure. We now report that the C. elegans intracellular serpin, SRP-6, exhibits a prosurvival function by blocking necrosis. Minutes after hypotonic shock, srp-6 null animals underwent a catastroph...

The present study determines the efficacy of N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) on marker enzymes, lipid peroxidation and antioxidants in carbon tetrachloride induced hepatotoxicity in rats. Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) (3 mL/kg/week) administered subcutaneously to albino Wistar rats for a period of three months significantly increased the activities of marker enzymes in plasma such as aspartate transamina...

Hepatitis C virus core protein is the viral nucleocapsid of hepatitis C virus. Interaction of core with cellular membranes like endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and lipid droplets (LD) appears to be involved in viral assembly. However, how these interactions with different cellular membranes are regulated is not well understood. In this study, we investigated how palmitoylation, a post-translational ...

Two soluble post-proline cleaving peptidase activities, PPCP1 and PPCP2, were demonstrated in Tenebrio molitor larval midgut with the substrate benzyloxycarbonyl-L-alanyl-L-proline p-nitroanilide. Both activities were serine peptidases. PPCP1 was active in acidic buffers, with maximum activity at pH 5.3, and was located mainly in the more acidic anterior midgut lumen. The dynamics of PPCP1 acti...

A cDNA microarray composed of 2,028 different ESTs from two shrimp species, Penaeus monodon and Masupenaeus japonicus, was employed to identify yellow head virus (YHV)-responsive genes in hemocytes of P. monodon. A total of 105 differentially expressed genes were identified and grouped into five different clusters according to their expression patterns. One of these clusters, which comprised fi...

In this work, the copolymer-based synthesized Cysteine-loaded nanocarriers prepared by a routine protocol, coprecipitation method. It is the first report to investigate the neuroprotective potential and biocompatibility of Cysteine derivatives loaded into poly(ethylene glycol)-block-poly(ε−caprolactone) methyl ether (PEG-b-PCL). The average size of the polymeric/empty NCs was 89 nm and for poly...