Kalirin is a multidomain guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) that activates Rho proteins, inducing cytoskeletal rearrangement in neurons. Although much is known about the effects of Kalirin on Rho GTPases and neuronal morphology, little is known about the association of Kalirin with the receptor/signaling systems that affect neuronal morphology. Our experiments demonstrate that Kalirin bin...

Previous genetic analysis showed that the polar effects of mutations in the hisG cistron of Salmonella typhimurium are dependent on the presence of a single putative transcription termination element within the hisG gene. In fact, all proximal mutations causing translation termination are strongly polar, whereas distal ones are not. The element was mapped by isolating mutations able to relieve ...

Trophoblast invasion ability is an important factor in early implantation and placental development. Recently, pituitary tumor transforming gene 1 (PTTG1) was shown to be involved in invasion and proliferation of cancer. However, the role of PTTG1 in trophoblast invasion remains unknown. Thus, in this study we analyzed PTTG1 expression in trophoblasts and its effect on trophoblast invasion acti...

Cell-cell contact formation following cadherin engagement requires actomyosin contraction along the periphery of cell-cell contact. The molecular mechanisms that regulate myosin activation during this process are not clear. In this paper, we show that two polarity proteins, partitioning defective 3 homologue (Par3) and mammalian homologues of Drosophila Lethal (2) Giant Larvae (Lgl1/2), antagon...

Obscurins are a family of RhoGEF-containing proteins with tumor and metastasis suppressing roles in breast epithelium. Downregulation of giant obscurins in normal breast epithelial cells leads to reduced levels of active RhoA and of its downstream effectors. Herein, we elucidate how depletion of giant obscurins affects the response of breast epithelial cells to changes in the mechanical propert...

Background: Endometriosis, a disease affecting 3-10% of women of reproductive age, is characterized by the ectopic growth of endometrial glands and stroma surrounded by dense fibrous tissue. Whereas, normal eutopic endometrium shows scarless tissue repair during menstrual cycles, which suggests that the endometriotic tissues have distinct mechanisms of fibrogenesis. During the development of en...

The integrin αvβ6 is up-regulated in numerous carcinomas, where expression commonly correlates with poor prognosis. αvβ6 promotes tumour invasion, partly through regulation of proteases and cell migration, and is also the principal mechanism by which epithelial cells activate TGF-β1; this latter function complicates therapeutic targeting of αvβ6, since TGF-β1 has both tumour-promoting and -supp...

UNLABELLED This study examined the relationship between the severity of aphasia and regional cerebral perfusion on brain SPECT using statistical parametric mapping (SPM) and a statistical probabilistic anatomic map (SPAM) in patients with a striatocapsular infarction (SCI) along with the other clinical and imaging findings. METHODS The subjects were 16 right-handed Korean-speaking patients wi...

BACKGROUND During vertebrate gastrulation convergence and extension (CE), movements narrow and lengthen embryonic tissues. In Xenopus and zebrafish, a noncanonical Wnt signaling pathway constitutes the vertebrate counterpart to the Drosophila planar cell polarity pathway and regulates mediolateral cell polarization underlying CE. Despite the identification of several signaling molecules require...

The activity of the Na(+)/H(+) exchanger NHE3 isoform, which is found primarily in epithelial cells, is sensitive to the state of actin polymerization. Actin assembly, in turn, is controlled by members of the small GTPase Rho family, namely Rac1, Cdc42, and RhoA. We therefore investigated the possible role of these GTPases in modulating NHE3 activity. Cells stably expressing NHE3 were transient...