BACKGROUND Disease recurrence in patients with acute myeloid leukemia may be partially explained by the escape of leukemic blasts from CD4(+) T-cell recognition. The current study investigates the role of aberrant HLA class II antigen presentation on leukemic blasts by determining both the clinical and functional impact of the class II-associated invariant chain peptide (CLIP). DESIGN AND MET...

Naturally occurring derivatives of pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) have been identified in various extra-pituitary sites, including the endocrine and exocrine pancreas. Corticotropin-like intermediate lobe peptide (CLIP = ACTH18-39), a naturally occurring derivative of POMC, has been suggested to be an insulin secretagogue. To determine whether CLIP might also affect the exocrine pancreas, we measu...

In the encoding of narrative episodes, the hippocampus exhibits memory-predictive activity time-locked to stimulus offset. In real life, however, events usually occur in succession, raising the question of how the immediate offline processing of one event is affected by presentation of another. To address this issue, participants were presented with brief narrative movie clips in a functional m...

Dear Editor, Laparoscopic sterilisation is a common method of permanent contraception. The Filshie clip system is a safe and effective method of female sterilisation. Being used around the world for more than 20 years, this form of contraception continues to be the method of choice for many physicians and patients due to the ease and simplicity of application and minimal tube damage produced. N...

Knowledge of mammal migrations is low, and human impacts on migrations high. This jeopardizes efforts to conserve terrestrial migrations. To aid the conservation of these migrations, we synthesized information worldwide, describing 24 large-bodied ungulates that migrate in aggregations. This synthesis includes maps of extinct and extant migrations, numbers of migrants, summaries of ecological d...

Identifying important "migratory species" and the characteristics of their migrations might sound like a simple starting point for efforts to conserve and protect animal migrations. However, migrations are dynamic phenomena that vary over space and time, and migratory behaviors can vary substantially among closely related species, subspecies, races, or populations, and even among individual ani...

CLIP-170 is a cytoplasmic linker protein that localizes to plus ends of microtubules in vivo. In this study, we have characterized the microtubule-binding properties of CLIP-170, to understand the mechanism of its plus end targeting. We show that the NH2-terminal microtubule-interacting domain of CLIP-170 alone localizes to microtubule plus ends when transfected into cells. Association of CLIP-...

Extracellular proteases play an important role in a wide range of host physiological events, such as food digestion, extracellular matrix degradation, coagulation and immunity. Among the large extracellular protease family, serine proteases that contain a "paper clip"-like domain and are therefore referred to as CLIP-domain serine protease (clip-SP), have been found to be involved in unique bio...