Bioinorganic medicinal chemistry remains a hot field for research aimed at developing novel anti-cancer treatments. Discovery of metal complexes as potent antitumor chemotherapeutics such as cisplatin led to a significant shift of focus toward organometallic/ bioinorganic compounds containing transition metals and their chelates as novel scaffolds for drug discovery. In that way, transition met...

Genes containing multiple pre-mRNA cleavage and polyadenylation sites, or polyA sites, express mRNA isoforms with variable 3' untranslated regions (UTRs). By systematic analysis of human and mouse transcriptomes, we found that short 3'UTR isoforms are relatively more abundant when genes are highly expressed whereas long 3'UTR isoforms are relatively more abundant when genes are lowly expressed....

A DNA microarray representing nearly all of the unique sequences of human Chromosome 22 was constructed and used to measure global-transcriptional activity in placental poly(A)(+) RNA. We found that many of the known, related and predicted genes are expressed. More importantly, our study reveals twice as many transcribed bases as have been reported previously. Many of the newly discovered expre...

Oct4 is a key component of the molecular circuitry which regulates embryonic stem cell proliferation and differentiation. It is essential for maintenance of undifferentiated, pluripotent cell populations, and accomplishes these tasks by binding DNA in multiple heterodimer and homodimer configurations. Very little is known about how formation of these complexes is regulated, or the mechanisms th...

We find that prothymosin alpha (PTalpha) selectively enhances transcriptional activation by the estrogen receptor (ER) but not transcriptional activity of other nuclear hormone receptors. This selectivity for ER is explained by PTalpha interaction not with ER, but with a 37-kDa protein denoted REA, for repressor of estrogen receptor activity, a protein that we have previously shown binds to ER,...

Increased glucose metabolism and reprogramming toward aerobic glycolysis are a hallmark of cancer cells, meeting their metabolic needs for sustained cell proliferation. Metabolic reprogramming is usually considered as a downstream consequence of tumor development and oncogene activation; growing evidence indicates, however, that metabolism on its turn can support oncogenic signaling to foster t...

Myelin associated glycoprotein (MAG) is an essential component of the periaxonal architecture of the myelin sheath. Because of its potent neurite growth repressive activity, MAG is also likely to play an important role in axonal guidance during the CNS development, and to be responsible for abortive neuronal regeneration in adult CNS. The MAG gene chromatin from approximately 1.6 to +0.6 kb fea...

Introduction Prrxl1 is a homeodomain transcription factor essential for the connectivity and survival of nociceptive neurons in the mouse embryo dorsal root ganglion (DRG) and spinal cord (SC). Prrxl1 mice show altered patterning of nociceptive afferent projections to the dorsal SC (dSC), neuronal loss, reduced nociception and failure to thrive. Prrxl1 displays a multiple band pattern on wester...