The performance of serologic tests in chronic Chagas disease diagnosis largely depends on the type and quality of the antigen preparations that are used for detection of anti-Trypanosoma cruzi antibodies. Whole-cell T. cruzi extracts or recombinant proteins have shown variation in the performance and cross-reactivity. Synthetic chimeric proteins comprising fragments of repetitive amino acids of...

Hepatitis B surface antigen is the first genetically engineered vaccine licensed for human use. Various strategies have been proposed to obtain a vaccine that would bypass the need for injection. In this study, a non-toxic portion of heat-stable enterotoxin of Escherichia coli that is capable of adhering to epithelial cells was inserted at amino acid position 112 of hepatitis surface antigen. T...

Transport of yeast alkaline phosphatase (ALP) to the vacuole depends on the clathrin adaptor-like complex AP-3, but does not depend on proteins necessary for transport through pre-vacuolar endosomes. We have identified ALP sequences that direct sorting into the AP-3-dependent pathway using chimeric proteins containing residues from the ALP cytoplasmic domain fused to sequences from a Golgi-loca...

It has been proposed that the architecture of protein domains has evolved by the combinatorial assembly and/or exchange of smaller polypeptide segments. To investigate this proposal, we fused DNA encoding the N-terminal half of a beta-barrel domain (from cold shock protein CspA) with fragmented genomic Escherichia coli DNA and cloned the repertoire of chimeric polypeptides for display on filame...

PURPOSE GnRH-based chimeric proteins have been shown to specifically target and kill adenocarcinomas both in vitro and in vivo. The purpose of this study is to construct a new GnRH-based chimeric protein for the treatment of adenocarcinomas in humans. RESULTS In this study, we constructed and characterized a new chimeric protein, GnRH-DFF40, composed of a new human killing moiety: the apoptot...

Background: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic pathogen, is a common cause of healthcare-associated infections in immunocompromised individuals. The rapid emergence of multidrug-resistant strains has made P. aeruginosa infections progressively difficult to treat. In this study we evaluated the effect of a chimeric protein containing a P. aeruginosa PilQ fragment and the PilA disulfide loo...

background: formation of secondary structure such as dna hairpins or loops may influence molecular genetics methods and pcr based approaches necessary for genetic engineering, in addition to gene regulation. materials and methods: a polymerase chain reaction with splice overlap extension (soe-pcr) was used to create fully synthetic 1f5 chimeric anti-cd20 heavy- and light-chain genes. the chimer...