OBJECTIVES We studied the clinical and genetic features of familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (FHC) caused by an Asp175Asn mutation in the alpha-tropomyosin gene in affected subjects from three unrelated families. BACKGROUND Correlation of genotype and phenotype has provided important information in FHC caused by beta-cardiac myosin and cardiac troponin T mutations. Comparable analyses of h...

The cellular kinase known as PKR (protein kinase RNA-activated) is induced by interferon and activated by RNA. PKR is known to have antiviral properties due to its role in translational control. Active PKR phosphorylates eukaryotic initiation factor 2 alpha and leads to inhibition of translation, including viral translation. PKR is also known to function as a tumor suppressor, presumably by lim...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Recent studies reported that apoptosis was involved in the pathogenesis of early brain injury after subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). The aim of this study was to examine whether sodium orthovanadate (SOV) prevents post-SAH apoptosis by modulating growth factors and its downstream receptor tyrosine kinases. Method- Rats were operated on with the endovascular perforation mode...

Tropomyosin is a coiled-coil protein that binds and regulates actin filaments. The tropomyosin gene in Schizosaccharomyces pombe, cdc8, is required for formation of actin cables, contractile rings, and polar localization of actin patches. The roles of conserved residues were investigated in gene replacement mutants. The work validates an evolution-based approach to identify tropomyosin function...

Tropomyosins are actin-binding regulatory proteins which overlap end-to-end along the filament. High resolution structures of the overlap regions were determined for muscle and non-muscle tropomyosins in the absence of actin. Conformations of the junction regions bound to actin are unknown. In this work, orientation of the overlap on actin alone and on actin-myosin complex was evaluated by meas...

Autonomous parvoviruses induce severe morphological and physiological alterations in permissive host cells, eventually leading to cell lysis and release of progeny virions. Viral cytopathic effects (CPE) result from specific rearrangements and destruction of cytoskeletal micro- and intermediate filaments. We recently reported that inhibition of endogenous casein kinase II (CKII) protects target...

Since tropomyosin is cross reactive in many arthropods, it was assumed that this highly conserved protein could be responsible for cross reactions in house dust mite (HDM) allergic patients who experienced adverse reactions after crustacean and mollusc ingestion. Here we report two clinical cases where the role of tropomyosin is a matter of debate. In the first case, the clinical history, as we...

BACKGROUND/AIMS We previously showed that a hypoxic environment modulates the antiarrhythmic potential of mesenchymal stem cells. METHODS To investigate the mechanism by which secreted proteins contribute to the pathogenesis of antiarrhythmic potential in mesenchymal stem cells, we used two-dimensional electrophoresis combined with MALDI-TOF-MS to perform a proteomic analysis to compare the p...