B7-H4, one of the costimulatory molecules of the B7 family, has been found to be widely expressed in many kinds of tumor tissues and to play an important part in tumor progression and poor prognosis. However, the role of B7-H4 in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) cells has not been elucidated. In this study, we found that, compared with normal esophageal tissue, B7-H4 was highly express...

B7-H4 is a recently identified member of the B7 family considered to negatively regulate the immune response, and has been associated with the occurrence and development of certain types of tumor. However, little is known regarding the importance of human B7-H4 expression in bladder urothelial carcinoma. In the present study, B7-H4 expression in the tissues and sera of patients with bladder uro...

Kap123, a major karyopherin protein of budding yeast, recognizes the nuclear localization signals (NLSs) of cytoplasmic histones H3 and H4 and translocates them into the nucleus during DNA replication. Mechanistic questions include H3- and H4-NLS redundancy toward Kap123 and the role of the conserved diacetylation of cytoplasmic H4 (K5ac and K12ac) in Kap123-mediated histone nuclear translocati...

The deposition of the histones H3/H4 onto DNA to give the tetrasome intermediate and the displacement of H3/H4 from DNA are thought to be the first and the last steps in nucleosome assembly and disassembly, respectively. Anti-silencing function 1 (Asf1) is a chaperone of the H3/H4 dimer that functions in both of these processes. However, little is known about the thermodynamics of chaperone-his...

Anti-silencing function 1 (Asf1) and Chromatin Assembly Factor 1 (CAF-1) chaperone histones H3/H4 during the assembly of nucleosomes on newly replicated DNA. To understand the mechanism of histone H3/H4 transfer among Asf1, CAF-1 and DNA from a thermodynamic perspective, we developed and employed biophysical approaches using full-length proteins in the budding yeast system. We find that the C-t...

The osteogenic growth peptide (OGP) is an extracellular mitogen identical to the histone H4 (H4) COOH-terminal residues 90-103, which regulates osteogenesis and hematopoiesis. By Northern analysis, OGP mRNA is indistinguishable from H4 mRNA. Indeed, cells transfected with a construct encoding [His102]H4 secreted the corresponding [His13]OGP. These results suggest production of OGP from H4 genes...

Covalent modifications of histones play crucial roles in chromatin structure and genomic stability. Recently, we reported a novel modification of histones: biotinylation of lysine residues. Here we provide evidence that K12-biotinylated histone H4 (K12Bio H4) maps specifically to both heterochromatin (alpha satellite repeats in pericentromeric regions) and transcriptionally repressed chromatin ...

We have purified a human histone H4 lysine 20 methyltransferase and cloned the encoding gene, PR/SET07. A mutation in Drosophila pr-set7 is lethal: second instar larval death coincides with the loss of H4 lysine 20 methylation, indicating a fundamental role for PR-Set7 in development. Transcriptionally competent regions lack H4 lysine 20 methylation, but the modification coincided with condense...

The molecular cloning of the t(5;10)(q33; q22) associated with atypical chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is reported. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), Southern blot, and reverse transcriptase– polymerase chain reaction analysis demonstrated that the translocation resulted in an H4/platelet-derived growth factor receptor bR (PDGFbR) fusion transcript that incorporated 5* sequences from H...

Histone H4 is highly conserved and forms a central-core nucleosome with H3 in eukaryotic chromatin. Its covalent modification at the protruding N-terminal region from the nucleosomal core can change the chromatin conformation in order to regulate gene expression. A viral H4 was found in the genome of Cotesia plutellae bracovirus (CpBV). The obligate host of the virus is an endoparasitoid wasp, ...