Three lethal and hemolytic toxins, caritoxin I, II and III were isolated from the sea anemone Actinia cari. Following controlled autolysis, tentacles were strained through a nylon sieve and thus a crude extract was obtained. The toxins were further purified by Sephadex G-75 gel chromatography. All three toxins which were eluted at the same peak, were separated by ion-exchange chromatography on ...

The role of the N-terminal segment 1-33 of equinatoxin II, a 20 kDa pore-forming protein from the sea anemone Actinia equina, was studied by N-truncation mutagenesis. A part of this segment was classified as being amphiphilic and membrane seeking. Wild-type equinatoxin II and its mutants lacking 5, 10 and 33 amino acid residues, respectively, were produced in Escherichia coli using T7 RNA polym...

The establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) can often lead to environmental differences between MPAs and fishing zones. To determine the effects on marine dispersal of environmental dissimilarity between an MPA and fishing zone, we examined the abundance and recruitment patterns of two anemonefishes (Amphiprion frenatus and A. perideraion) that inhabit sea anemones in different managemen...

The Kunitz-type protease inhibitors are the best-characterized family of serine protease inhibitors, probably due to their abundance in several organisms. These inhibitors consist of a chain of ~60 amino acid residues stabilized by three disulfide bridges, and was first observed in the bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (BPTI)-like protease inhibitors, which strongly inhibit trypsin and chymot...

HS (heparan sulfate) proteoglycans are key regulators of vital processes in the body. HS chains with distinct sequences bind to various protein ligands, such as growth factors and morphogens, and thereby function as important regulators of protein gradient formation and signal transduction. HS is synthesized through the concerted action of many different ER (endoplasmic reticulum) and Golgi-res...

Sea anemone contain a number of closely related peptide heart stimulants. In the present investigation, the conformation of anthropleurin A from Anthopleura xanthogrammica was investigated by laser Raman, circular dichroism, and fluorescence spectral methods and by the Chou-Fasman method using sequence data. The recent 13C NMR data of the peptide (Norton, R.S., and Norton, T.R. (1979) J. Biol. ...

High and low affinity binding sites for tetrodotoxin have been found in rat skeletal muscle cells in vitro using a radiolabeled tetrodotoxin derivative and 22Na+ flux studies. High affinity binding sites for tetrodotoxin (KD(tetrodotoxin) = 1.6 nM) cannot be detected at the myoblast stage. They appear and increase in density as myoblasts fuse into myotubes to reach a maximum binding capacity of...

Intronic sequences represent a large fraction of most eukaryotic genomes, and they are known to play a critical role in genome evolution. Based on the conserved location of introns, conserved sequence within introns, and direct experimental evidence, it is becoming increasingly clear that introns perform important functions such as modulating gene expression. Here, we demonstrate that the posit...

The solution properties, secondary structure and global fold of the 27-residue polypeptide neurotoxin III (ATX III), from the sea anemone Anemonia sulcata, have been investigated using high-resolution 1H-n.m.r. spectroscopy. Studies of the concentration dependence of the n.m.r. spectrum indicate that the molecule self-associates in the millimolar concentration range useable for n.m.r. analysis,...

The Pacific intertidal sea anemone Anthopleura xanthogrammica hosts 2 algal symbionts, zoochlorellae Elliptochloris marina and zooxanthellae Symbiodinium muscatinei, either alone or co-occurring. Previous studies have suggested that zoochlorellae and zooxanthellae represent ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ symbionts with respect to their field distributions, and that these symbionts may differ in their nutrit...