BACKGROUND The prevalence of dyslipidemia is rising alarmingly in elderly Han Chinese male patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). The genetic factors that contribute to the development of diabetic dyslipidemia remain incompletely identified. This study was conducted to assess the association between vitamin D receptor (VDR) polymorphisms and development of dyslipidemia in the Han elderl...

Transcription-activator like effector nucleases (TALENs) are tailor-made DNA endonucleases and serve as a powerful tool for genome engineering. Site-specific DNA cleavage can be made by the dimerization of FokI nuclease domains at custom-targeted genomic loci, where a pair of TALENs must be positioned in close proximity with an appropriate orientation. However, the simultaneous delivery and coo...

Protein–induced DNA looping is a key regulatory mechanism involved in important processes such as transcription, gene regulation and replication. The relationship between the induced loop topology and DNA–protein dynamics is essential for understanding these processes. Here, we use tethered–particle motion (TPM) to examine the impact of bending and twisting rigidity of protein–induced DNA loopi...

Introduction Polymorphisms of the vitamin D receptor (VDR) gene have been investigated in various case-control studies to evaluate prostate cancer susceptibility; however, published data on the association between vitamin D receptor gene FokI polymorphism and prostate cancer risk are inconclusive. Material and methods To assess the impact of vitamin D receptor gene FokI polymorphism, we perfo...

We determined the association of vitamin D deficiency and the FokI polymorphism of the vitamin D receptor (VDR) gene in 760 patients who underwent angiography due to suspected coronary artery disease (CAD). Angiography and the Rentrop scoring system were used to classify the severity of CAD in each patient and to grade the extent of collateral development, respectively. Polymerase chain reactio...

Operating through the vitamin D receptor (VDR), vitamin D inhibits prostate cancer growth and increases insulin-like growth factor binding protein (IGFBP) expression, suggesting that the vitamin D and insulin-like growth factor (IGF) regulatory systems may operate together to affect prostate cancer. Among 191 newly diagnosed prostate cancer cases and 304 randomly selected population controls in...

FokI is a type IIs restriction endonuclease which recognizes an asymmetric DNA sequence and cleaves DNA a short distance away from the sequence. The enzyme is bipartite in nature with its DNA recognition and cleavage functions located on distinct domains. We report here cocrystals of the complete FokI enzyme (579 amino acids) bound to a 20-bp DNA fragment containing its recognition sequence. Th...

BACKGROUND Vitamin D has been considered a key player in various malignancies including cutaneous cancers. To date, mycosis fungoides (MF) has been the least studied in relation to vitamin D. Furthermore, the vitamin D receptor (VDR) single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have not been tackled before in the context of MF, despite their incrimination in numerous diseases. AIM OF STUDY To asses...

We investigated associations between vitamin D receptor (VDR) gene polymorphisms, FokI T>C (rs2228570), BsmI G>A (rs1544410), ApaI G>T (rs7975232), and TaqI T>C (rs731236), with bone mineral density (BMD) in postmenopausal Mexican-Mestizo women. Three hundred and twenty postmenopausal women participated, who were classified according to World Health Organization criteria as non-osteoporotic (No...

The CRISPR/Cas9 system is a recently developed genome editing technique. In this study, we used a modified CRISPR system, which employs the fusion of inactive Cas9 (dCas9) and the FokI endonuclease (FokI-dCas9) to correct the most common variant (allele frequency 21.4%) in the phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH) gene - c.1222C>T (p.Arg408Trp) - as an approach toward curing phenylketonuria (PKU). PK...