Single-strand breaks (SSBs) are the most common type of oxidative DNA damage and they are related to aging and many genetic diseases. The scaffold protein for repair of SSBs, XRCC1, accumulates at sites of poly(ADP-ribose) (pAR) synthesized by PARP, but it is retained at sites of SSBs after pAR degradation. How XRCC1 responds to SSBs after pAR degradation and how this affects repair progression...

Cylindrospermopsin (CYN) is a cyanotoxin that has been recognised as an emerging potential public health risk. Although CYN toxicity has been demonstrated, the mechanisms involved have not been fully characterised. To identify some key pathways related to this toxicity, we studied the transcriptomic profile of human intestinal Caco-2 cells exposed to a sub-toxic concentration of CYN (1.6 µM for...

DNA damage causes genome instability and cell death, but many of the cellular responses to DNA damage still remain elusive. We here report a human protein, PALF (PNK and APTX-like FHA protein), with an FHA (forkhead-associated) domain and novel zinc-finger-like CYR (cysteine-tyrosine-arginine) motifs that are involved in responses to DNA damage. We found that the CYR motif is widely distributed...

The diachronic development of Afrikaans phonotactics is characterized by a considerable number of processes that affect consonant clusters, i.e. sequences of two or more consonants, especially when occurring in the word-final coda position (cf. Watermeyer 1996; Roberge 2002). For example, clusters were reduced in direk /dɪrək/ ('direct', Dutch direct) or nag /nɑx/ ('night', Dutch nacht). Nevert...

lentinan a polysaccharide from medicinal mushroom i.e lentinus, has been known to have anticancer properties. telomerase activity is not observed in normal healthy cells, whereas in cancerous cells telomerase expression is high. telomerase represents a promising cancer therapeutic target. we investigated the inhibitory effect of lentinan on telomerase reverse transcriptase gene (htert) which is...

lentiviral vectors are promising gene delivery tools capable of transducing a variety of dividing and non-dividing cells, including pluripotent stem cells which are refractory for transduction by murine retroviruses. although there is a growing debate on the safety of lentiviral vectors for gene transfer, in particular for those derived from human immunodeficiency viruses, type one (hiv-1) and ...

abstract background: schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder and numerous genes and loci are beleived to be involved in this disease. recent studies have reported a strong genetic association between dtnbp1 (dystrobrevin-binding protein 1) gene variants and schizophrenia. methods: in this research, we used a case-control study to establish the possible association between the p1635 (rs3213207...

the engineering of transgenic canola (brassica napus l. ) to make tolerance to the broad-spectrum herbicide, glyphosate, is one of the most effective approaches for weed management. glyphosate inhibits the enzyme epsps (5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase) enzyme which functions in the shikimate pathway and has a key role in biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids required for survival of ...