The Wilson's disease protein (WNDP), a copper transporter, is a crucial mediator of copper homoeostasis in mammalian cells. We recently found that changes in copper concentration regulate the phosphorylation level of WNDP. WNDP phosphorylation was observed in several mammalian cell lines, suggesting that a common phosphorylation pathway exists in these cells. Here we demonstrate that WNDP expre...

Dentin sialoprotein (DSP) and phosphophoryn (PP), acidic proteins critical to dentin mineralization, are translated from a single transcript as a DSP-PP precursor that undergoes specific proteolytic processing to generate DSP and PP. The cleavage mechanism continues to be controversial, in part because of the difficulty of obtaining DSP-PP from mammalian cells and dentin matrix. We have infecte...

Reteplase is a potent thrombolytic agent which is widely used in the management of acute myocardial infarction and stroke. It belongs to the third generation of the thrombolytic drugs and has been derived from native human tissue plasminogen activator by removing three domains of it and keeping the Kringle 2 and Serine protease domains. However, the high cost of this drug, has limited the appli...

The human foamy virus (HFV) bel-1 transactivator protein was expressed in insect cells by a recombinant baculovirus. For the generation of the recombinant baculovirus, Acbel-1, the bel-1 gene of an HFV mutant was used, that bears truncations in the bel-1 overlapping bel-2 open reading frame. Acbel-1 infected Sf9 cells produced high amounts of recombinant protein of the same electrophoretic mobi...

This report describes novel baculovirus vectors designed to express mammalian beta1,4-galactosyltransferase and alpha2,6-sialyltransferase genes at early times after infection. Sf9 cells infected with these viral vectors, unlike cells infected with a wild-type baculovirus, produced a sialylated viral glycoprotein during the late phase of infection. Thus, the two mammalian glycosyltransferases e...

The biosynthesis of neutral fat-transporting lipoproteins involves the lipidation of their nonexchangeable apolipoprotein. In contrast to its mammalian homolog apolipoprotein B, however, insect apolipophorin-II/I (apoLp-II/I) is cleaved posttranslationally at a consensus substrate sequence for furin, resulting in the appearance of two apolipoproteins in insect lipoprotein. To characterize the c...

In the present study, the bovine coronavirus (BCV) spike glycoprotein cleavage products (S1 and S2) were individually expressed in Spodoptera frugiperda (Sf9) insect cells, using a baculovirus expression system. The coding sequence of S1 and S2 gene fragments were amplified by RT-PCR and cloned into the baculovirus shuttle vector pBlueBac4.5/V5-His TOPO ® TA. The cloned fragments were inserted ...

At present, the details of lamina alterations after baculovirus infection remain elusive. In this study, a lamin gene in the Sf9 cell line of Spodoptera frugiperda was cloned. The open reading frame (orf) of the Sf9 lamin was 1860 bp and encoded a protein with a molecular weight of 70 kDa. A transfection assay with a red fluorescence protein (rfp)-lamin fusion protein indicated that Sf9 lamin w...