CED-4 protein plays an important role in the induction of programmed cell death in Caenorhabditis elegans through the activation of caspases. However, the precise mechanisms by which it activates caspases remain unknown. To investigate the conservation of CED-4 function in evolution, transgenic Drosophila lines that express CED-4 in the compound eye were generated. Ectopic expression of CED-4 i...

Demonstrating in vivo interaction of two important biomolecules and the relevance of the interaction to a biological process have been difficult issues in biomedical research. Here, we report the use of a homology modeling approach to establish the significance of protein interactions in governing the activation of programmed cell death in Caenorhabditis elegans. A protein interaction cascade h...

We developed a method for examining the effects of overexpressing cell-death-related genes in specific Caenorhabditis elegans neurons that normally live. Using this method, we demonstrated that the cell-death genes ced-3, ced-4, and ced-9 all can act cell autonomously to control programmed cell death. Our observations indicate further that not only the protective activity of ced-9 but also the ...

The CED-4 homo-oligomer or apoptosome is required for initiation of programmed cell death in Caenorhabditis elegans by facilitating autocatalytic activation of the CED-3 caspase zymogen. How the CED-4 apoptosome assembles and activates CED-3 remains enigmatic. Here we report the crystal structure of the complete CED-4 apoptosome and show that it consists of eight CED-4 molecules, organized as a...

The Caenorhabditis elegans Bcl-2-like protein CED-9 prevents programmed cell death by antagonizing the Apaf-1-like cell-death activator CED-4. Endogenous CED-9 and CED-4 proteins localized to mitochondria in wild-type embryos, in which most cells survive. By contrast, in embryos in which cells had been induced to die, CED-4 assumed a perinuclear localization. CED-4 translocation induced by the ...

The Malaysian Adults Nutrition Survey (MANS) was carried out between October 2002 and July 2003, involving 6,775 men and 3,441 women aged 18 - 59 years. Anthropometric assessment showed that the overall mean body weight and BMI were 62.65 kg (CI: 62.20, 63.09) and 24.37 kg/m2 (CI: 24.21, 24.53) respectively. Based on the WHO (1998) classification of BMI, 12.15% (CI: 11.26, 13.10) were obese (BM...

Most automotive plastic waste (APW) is landfilled or used in energy recovery as it unsuitable for high-quality product mechanical recycling. Chemical recycling via pyrolysis offers a pathway toward closing the material loop by handling this heterogeneous and providing feedstock producing virgin plastics. This study compares chemical scenarios APW regarding climate change impact cumulative deman...

Early life nutritional exposures, combined with changes in lifestyle in adult life, can result in increased risk of chronic diseases. Although much of the focus on the developmental origins of disease has been on birth size and growth in postnatal life and the availability of energy and protein during these critical developmental periods, micronutrient deficiencies may also play an important ro...

Rac1 is a founding member of the Rho-GTPase family and a key regulator of membrane remodeling. In the context of apoptotic cell corpse engulfment, CED-10/Rac1 acts with its bipartite guanine nucleotide exchange factor, CED-5/Dock180-CED-12/ELMO, in an evolutionarily conserved pathway to promote phagocytosis. Here we show that in the context of the Caenorhabditis elegans intestinal epithelium CE...