Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is a very dangerous livestock disease which causes a serious loss in the production of milk and meat. Therefore, producing an effective recombinant subunit vaccine virus this disease is of great importance. Transient gene expression is a valuable tool to reach rapid and acceptable recombinant vaccine. An Agrobacterium-mediated transient gene expression assay was car...

Compared with other flaviviruses, Zika virus (ZIKV) is uniquely associated with congenital diseases in pregnant women. One recent study reported that (i) ZIKV has higher thermostability than dengue virus (DENV [a flavivirus closely related to ZIKV]), which might contribute to the disease outcome; (ii) the higher thermostability of ZIKV could arise from an extended loop structure in domain III o...

AML1, a gene on chromosome 21 encoding a transcription factor, is disrupted in the (8;21)(q22;q22) and (3;21)(q26;q22) chromosomal translocations associated with myelogenous leukemias; as a result, chimeric proteins AML1/ETO(MTG8) and AML1/Evi-1 are generated, respectively. To clarify the roles of AML1/ETO(MTG8) and AML1/Evi-1 in leukemogenesis, we investigated subcellular localization of these...

AML1, a gene on chromosome 21 encoding a transcription factor, is disrupted in the (8;21)(q22;q22) and (3;21)(q26;q22) chromosomal translocations associated with myelogenous leukemias; as a result, chimeric proteins AML1/ETO(MTG8) and AML1/Evi-1 are generated, respectively. To clarify the roles of AML1/ETO(MTG8) and AML1/Evi-1 in leukemogenesis, we investigated subcellular localization of these...

Cysteine/histidine-dependent amidohydrolase/peptidase (CHAP) and amidase are known as catalytic domains of the bacteriophage-derived endolysin LysK and were previously reported to show lytic activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). In the current study, the in silico design and analysis of chimeric CHAP-amidase model was applied to enhance the stability and solubilit...

The majority of severe visual loss in the United States results from complications associated with retinal neovascularization in patients with ischemic ocular diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, retinal vein occlusion, and retinopathy of prematurity. Intraocular expression of the angiogenic protein vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is closely correlated with neovascularization in the...

Gene therapy is expected to lead to new and useful methods to treat diseases. The development of assays to quantitate gene-therapy-derived proteins circulating in blood will be essential to investigate the effects and side effects of the introduced proteins. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether a protein circulating at trace concentrations in blood can be measured by tagging a pepti...

Avidins are a family of proteins widely employed in biotechnology. We have previously shown that functional chimeric mutant proteins can be created from avidin and avidin-related protein 2 using a methodology combining random mutagenesis by recombination and selection by a tailored biopanning protocol (phage display). Here, we report the crystal structure of one of the previously selected and c...

Viral assembly is an ideal system in which to investigate the transient recognition and interplay between proteins. During morphogenesis, scaffolding proteins temporarily associate with structural proteins, stimulating conformational changes that promote assembly and inhibit off-pathway reactions. Microviridae morphogenesis is dependent on two scaffolding proteins, an internal and an external s...