Transcription factors of the interferon regulatory factor (IRF) family have been identified as critical mediators of early inflammatory gene transcription in infected cells. We recently determined that, besides IRF-3 and IRF-7, IRF-5 serves as a direct transducer of virus-mediated signaling. In contrast to that mediated by the other two IRFs, IRF-5-mediated activation is virus specific. We show...

Telomerase activity is downregulated in somatic cells but is upregulated during the activation of cells of the immune system. The mechanism of this reactivation is not well understood. In this study, we demonstrated that interferon regulatory factor 4 (IRF-4) and, to a lesser extent, IRF-8 induce telomerase activity. The suppression of IRF-4 results in decreased levels of TERT (telomerase rever...

Originally identified as regulators of the type I Interferon system, the nine mammalian members of the Interferon Regulatory Factor (IRF) family are transcriptional regulators with multiple biologic functions, among which the best known are those involved in initiating and regulating many aspect of host immunity, downstream pattern recognition receptors in response to cell injuries. In addition...

Although lineage I West Nile virus (WNV) strain Eg101 induced beta interferon (IFN-beta) production as early as 12 h after infection in primary mouse embryo fibroblasts and did not inhibit the JAK-STAT signaling pathway, it was still able to replicate efficiently. To gain insights about possible viral countermeasures used by this virus to suppress the host response, the cell transcriptional pro...

Interferon (IFN) regulatory factors (IRFs) are a family of transcription factors among which are IRF-1, IRF-2, and IFN consensus sequence binding protein (ICSBP). These factors share sequence homology in the N-terminal DNA-binding domain. IRF-1 and IRF-2 are further related and have additional homologous sequences within their C-termini. Whereas IRF-2 and ICSBP are identified as transcriptional...

Viruses have evolved elaborate mechanisms to evade or inactivate the complex system of sensors and signaling molecules that make up the host innate immune response. Here we show that human coronavirus (HCoV) NL63 and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) CoV papain-like proteases (PLP) antagonize innate immune signaling mediated by STING (stimulator of interferon genes, also known as MITA/ER...

Interferon regulatory factors IRF-3 and IRF-7 are transcription factors essential in the activation of interferon-β (IFN-β) gene in response to viral infections. Although, both proteins recognize the same consensus IRF binding site AANNGAAA, they have distinct DNA binding preferences for sites in vivo. The X-ray structures of IRF-3 and IRF-7 DNA binding domains (DBDs) bound to IFN-β promoter el...

Initiation, Response, and Feedback(IRF) sequences are the most frequent interaction network in any classroom contexts. IRF sequences have been examined profusely in previous studies and were reported to be negatively correlated with participation opportunities (Kasper, 2006; Cazden, 2001; Ellis, 1994).In all these studies, all contingent factors of any classroom context which might influence in...

In this paper we present an overview of recent developments in discourse theory and parsing under the Linguistic Discourse Model (LDM) framework, a semantic theory of discourse structure. We give a novel approach to the problem of discourse segmentation based on discourse semantics and sketch a limited but robust approach to symbolic discourse parsing based on syntactic, semantic and lexical ru...