Bacillus subtilis is an attractive host for production of recombinant proteins. Promoters and expression plasmid backbones have direct impacts on the efficiency of gene expression. To screen and isolate strong promoters, a promoter trap vector pShuttleF was developed in this study. Using the vector, approximately 1000 colonies containing likely promoters from Bacillus licheniformis genomic DNA ...

Raising children with chronic diseases has been described as a stressing situation for carers. Several studies, especially in asthma and rhinitis, have documented psychological and physiologic impact on carers. However, little work describing the psychosocial impact of raising children with food allergy (FA) has been done. Consecutive carers (63) from the Universidad de Chile Clinical Hospital ...

The importance of mitochondrial activity has recently been extended to the regulation of developmental processes. Numerous pathologies associated with organelle’s dysfunctions emphasize their physiological importance. However, regulation of mitochondrial genome transcription, a key element for organelle’s function, remains poorly understood. After characterization in the organelle of a truncate...

Human glutaminyl-tRNA synthetase (QRS) is one of several mammalian aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (ARSs) that form a macromolecular protein complex. To understand the mechanism of QRS targeting to the multi-ARS complex, we analyzed both exogenous and endogenous QRSs by immunoprecipitation after overexpression of various Myc-tagged QRS mutants in human embryonic kidney 293 cells. Whereas a deletion ...

Upon activation, the apoptosis-inducing cell membrane receptor CD95 (APO-1/Fas) recruits a set of intracellular signaling proteins (CAP1-4) into a death-inducing signaling complex (DISC). In the DISC, CAP1 and CAP2 represent FADD/MORT1. CAP4 was identified recently as an ICE-like protease, FLICE, with two death effector domains (DED). Here we show that FLICE binds to FADD through its N-terminal...

An engineered Fas-associated death domain protein (FADD), 2DEDplusE-made previously by fusing the tandem DEDs of FADD to the E protein of lambda phage-greatly enhances apoptosis-inducing activity in adherent cells in vitro. To investigate the mechanism of apoptosis-inducing activity of this engineered FADD, we compared the apoptosis-inducing activity of various other engineered FADDs. The tande...