BACKGROUND Angiogenesis is essential for the growth and metastasis of cancer. Although anti-angiogenic agents, particularly vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibitors, have exhibited single-agent activity, there is considerable interest in combining these novel drugs with conventional chemotherapy reagents to achieve an optimal clinical efficacy. The objective of this study was to eva...

AIM To evaluate the diagnostic value of telomerase expression in intracranial tumours. METHODS 98 surgical specimens from different neoplasms were analysed by the telomeric repeat amplification protocol (TRAP) and the presence of telomerase compared with the histological diagnosis and the proliferation index. RESULTS A high degree of positivity for telomerase activity was found in glioblast...

The development of an efficacious vaccine against the Plasmodium parasite remains a top priority. Previous research has demonstrated the ability of a prime-boost virally vectored sub-unit vaccination regimen, delivering the liver-stage expressed malaria antigen TRAP, to produce high levels of antigen-specific T cells. The liver-stage of malaria is the main target of T cell-mediated immunity, ye...

Protein-protein interactions (PPI) are involved in a myriad of cellular processes, and their deregulation can lead to many diseases. One such process is protein ubiquitination that requires an orchestrated action three key enzymes add ubiquitin moieties substrate proteins. Importantly, this reversible through deubiquitinating enzymes. Both deubiquitination require PPIs once classified be utiliz...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the serine/threonine protein phosphatase inhibitor, calyculin-A (CLA), on clot formation and on the procoagulant activity of human platelets. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) samples were preincubated with buffer or CLA and subsequently platelets were activated by the protease-activated receptor 1 (PAR-1) activator, thrombin receptor activating p...

This study investigates the ability of larvae and adult rover and sitter Drosophila melanogaster to detect and migrate towards the source of a fly medium attractant using larval plate assays and an adult olfactory trap assay. Allelic variation at the foraging locus which encodes a cGMP-dependent protein kinase (PKG) did not affect larval olfactory response in the larval plate assays. In contras...

The most commonly used optical-trapping assays are coupled to surfaces, yet such assays lack atomic-scale ( approximately 0.1 nm) spatial resolution due to drift between the surface and trap. We used active stabilization techniques to minimize surface motion to 0.1 nm in three dimensions and decrease multiple types of trap laser noise (pointing, intensity, mode, and polarization). As a result, ...