objectives this study evaluates the correlation between hbv infection and snp in il-10 gene promoter. patients and methods ninety-six hbv-infected patients (32 chronic hepatitis b infection patients, 34 healthy carriers, 30 spontaneously recovered cases) and 31 healthy controls were enrolled. three biallelic (-819,-592,-1082) regions in the il-10 gene promoter were sequenced for all patients. r...

One of the earliest events in the Myxococcus xanthus developmental cycle is production of an extracellular cell density signal called A-signal (or A-factor). Previously, we showed that cells carrying an insertion in the asgE gene fail to produce normal levels of this cell-cell signal. In this study we found that expression of asgE is growth phase regulated and developmentally regulated. Several...

In this paper we are approaching, from a computational perspective, the problem of promoter sequences prediction, an important problem within the field of bioinformatics. As the conditions for a DNA sequence to function as a promoter are not known, machine learning based classification models are still developed to approach the problem of promoter identification in the DNA. We are proposing a c...

Abnormalities of genomic methylation patterns are lethal or cause disease, but the cues that normally designate CpG dinucleotides for methylation are poorly understood. We have developed a new method of methylation profiling that has single-CpG resolution and can address the methylation status of repeated sequences. We have used this method to determine the methylation status of >275 million Cp...

Epigenetic mechanisms play important roles during normal development1, aging2, and a variety of disease conditions. Numerous studies have implicated aberrant methylation in the etiology of common human disease, including cancer, MS, diabetes, and schizophrenia3,4. Hypermethylation of CpG islands located in the promoter regions of tumor suppressor genes is firmly established as the most frequent...

In Neisseria meningitidis, the reversible expression of surface antigens, i.e. phase variation, results from changes within repeated simple sequence motifs located in coding or promoter regions of the genes involved in their biosynthesis. The mutation rates of these simple sequences, which have a major influence on the generation of phenotypic diversity, can affect the fitness of the population...

Polymorphisms in the interleukin-6 promoter region have been associated with diseases. In this study we investigated the -634G/C and -174G/C IL-6 promoter polymorphisms in three Brazilian ethnic groups. We verified that the allele frequencies of the two polymorphisms and haplotype frequencies varied significantly between the populations.

Transcription of the subgenomic mRNA of Sindbis virus (SINV) is initiated at a subgenomic promoter (SP). Alignment of SINV sequences identified a 68-nucleotide conserved domain spanning -19 to +49 relative to the subgenomic mRNA start site. Nucleotide T or C is present at -18 or +49 in all known SINVs while a Sindbis-like virus XJ-160 has an A or T at a corresponding position. Our results indic...

We have previously described a vaccinia virus late transcription factor, VLTF-X, which we found to be present in cells at early and late times in infection. In this study, transcription complementation assays were used to demonstrate that VLTF-X activity is also present in virion extracts and in the cytoplasm of uninfected HeLa cells. Mobility shift assays performed on various VLTF-X preparatio...

Genes encoding subunits of photosystem I (PSI genes) in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. strain PCC 6803 are actively transcribed under low-light conditions, whereas their transcription is coordinately and rapidly down-regulated upon the shift to high-light conditions. In order to identify the molecular mechanism of the coordinated high-light response, we searched for common light-responsiv...