Although mosquito genome projects uncovered orthologues of many known developmental regulatory genes, extremely little is known about the development of vector mosquitoes. Here, we investigate the role of the Netrin receptor frazzled (fra) during embryonic nerve cord development of two vector mosquito species. Fra expression is detected in neurons just prior to and during axonogenesis in the em...

Induction of phase 2 detoxification enzymes by phenolic antioxidants can account for prevention of tumor initiation but cannot explain why these compounds inhibit tumor promotion. Phase 2 genes are induced through an antioxidant response element (ARE). Although the ARE resembles an AP-1 binding site, we show that the major ARE binding and activating protein is not AP-1. Interestingly, AP-1 DNA ...

Mesothelioma is a unique and insidious tumor associated historically with occupational exposure to asbestos. The transcription factor, activator protein-1 (AP-1) is a major target of asbestos-induced signaling pathways. Here, we demonstrate that asbestos-induced mesothelial cell transformation is linked to increases in AP-1 DNA binding complexes and the AP-1 component, Fra-1. AP-1 binding to DN...

whereas the recognition of c-Fos (a protein of the same family as Fra-1), MS2-polymerase (the protein in fusion) and β-galactosidase (a nonspecific protein that allows to control for nonspecific anti-Fra-1 reactivity as well as its reactivity to contaminating bacterial proteins) decreases. These results are confirmed by the Western blots shown in Figure 2, where anti-Fra-1 antiserum recognition...

Recent studies indicate a potential role for Fra-1, a heterodimeric partner of AP1, in toxicantinduced epithelial injury, repair, and cellular transformation. Here, we have investigated the effects of diesel exhaust particles (DEP) on fra-1 expression in C10 cells, a nonmalignant murine alveolar type II-like epithelial cell line. DEP markedly up-regulated fra-1, but not fra-2, expression. The i...

Among the several effectors that mediate TNF-alpha action is AP-1, which consists of transcription factors belonging to the JUN and FOS families. Although the effects of TNF-alpha in immune cells, such as the induction of NF-kappaBeta, are well known, the mechanisms by which it induces transcriptional activation of AP-1 in pulmonary epithelial cells are not well defined. In this study, we repor...

The frontal association cortex (FrA) is implicated in higher brain function. Aberrant FrA activity is likely to be involved in dementia pathology. However, the functional circuits both within the FrA and with other regions are unclear. A recent study showed that inactivation of the FrA impairs memory consolidation of an auditory fear conditioning in young mice. In addition, dendritic spine remo...

Frequency response analysis (FRA) is a powerful and widely used tool for condition assessment in power transformers. However, interpretation schemes are still challenging. Studies show that FRA data can be influenced by parameters other than winding deformation, including temperature. In this study, machine-learning approach with temperature as an input attribute was to objectively identify fau...

Previous studies demonstrated that basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) decreases elastin gene transcription in pulmonary fibroblasts. In this study we pursue the identification of the element and the trans-acting factors responsible. Gel shift analyses show that bFGF increases protein binding to a sequence located at -564 to -558 base pairs (bp), which possesses homology to both AP1 and cAMP-...

abstract  background: the brain response to temporal frequencies (tf) has been already reported, but with no study reported for different tf with respect to various spatial frequencies (sf).  materials and methods: fmri was performed by 1.5t ge-system in 14 volunteers during checkerboard, with tfs of 4, 6, 8 and 10hz in low and high sfs of 0.5 and 8cpd.  results: average percentage bold signal ...