A portion of the 5”flanking region of the glycoprotein IIb (aI,) integrin gene extending from -598 to +32 base pairs was isolated. This DNA segment is capable of driving low level base-line transcription in undifferentiated K562 cells. It also contains elements which direct the markedly increased expression observed following megakaryocytic differentiation of K562 cells with phorbo1 dibutyr...

The Drosophila germline lineage depends on a complex microenvironment of extrinsic and intrinsic factors that regulate the self-renewing and asymmetric divisions of dedicated stem cells. Germline stem cells (GSCs) must express components of the Dpp cassette and the translational repressors Nanos and Pumilio, whereas cystoblasts require the bam and bgcn genes. Bam is especially attractive as a t...

The neuron-restrictive silencer factor [NRSF (RE-1 silencing transcription factor/X box repressor)] is a transcriptional silencer, which we have previously implicated in deregulation of the vasopressin promoter in small cell lung cancer (SCLC). Here we describe a novel splice variant of the NRSF transcript, which is highly expressed in SCLCs. The variant was detected in both established cell li...

A gene encoding a novel CACCC box-binding protein that binds to the promoter region of the human T-cell receptor (TCR) V beta 8.1 gene and the mouse TCR alpha gene silencer has been cloned. This gene, termed ht beta, contains four zinc fingers of the class Cys2-X12-His2 that may be responsible for DNA binding and a highly negatively charged region that defines a putative transcriptional activat...

This article presents an analytic mode-matching approach suitable for modelling the propagation of sound in a two-dimensional, three-part, ducting system. The approach avoids the need to find roots of the characteristic equation for the middle section of the duct (the component) and is readily applicable to a broad class of problems. It is demonstrated that the system of equations, derived via ...

Choline acetyltransferase (ChAT), the biosynthetic enzyme of acetylcholine, and the vesicular acetylcholine transporter (VAChT) are both required for cholinergic neurotransmission. These proteins are encoded by two embedded genes, the VAChT gene lying within the first intron of the ChAT gene. In the nervous system, both ChAT and VAChT are synthesized only in cholinergic neurons, and it is there...

In this issue of Immunity, He et al. (2008) establish the logic and circuitry that determine CD4-CD8 lineage specification. It all comes down to an eighty base pair silencer switch.

The growing noise exposure of residents, due to a rising number of flights, causes significant impacts on physical health. Therefore it is necessary to reduce the noise emission of aircrafts. During take-off, the noise generated by the jet engines is dominating. One way to lower the noise emission of jet engines is to build an absorption silencer by using porous liners. Because of the high ther...

The removal of the second intron in the HIV-1 rev/tat pre-mRNAs, which involves the joining of splice site SD4 to SA7, is inhibited by hnRNP A1 by a mechanism that requires the intronic splicing silencer (ISS) and the exon splicing silencer (ESS3). In this study, we have determined the RNA secondary structure and the hnRNP A1 binding sites within the 3' splice site region by phylogenetic compar...

The Bcl6 proto-oncogene, which encodes a transcriptional repressor, is ubiquitously expressed and predominantly in germinal center (GC) B cells. Although the promoter region of the human Bcl6 gene has been reported, enhancer molecules for its high expression in GC B cells were largely unknown. Here we show that transcriptional start sites of the murine Bcl6 gene were different from the reported...