Mechanism of action of anesthetics--ketamine derivatives--on phospholipid membranes

Fluorescent probes were applied in the studies of ketamine derivatives interaction with model phospholipid membranes (liposomes). It has been found that kalipsol and ketalar have no effects on the lipid phase viscosity, but increase markedly a positive surface membrane charge. The action of these substances manifests some seconds after the addition to the membrane suspension. The binding constant of ketamine (Cb = 1.2 X 10(3) M-1) and the number of binding sites (N = 1 mol per 7.5 mol of phosphatidyl-choline) have been calculated.     

High Expression Level of SP1, CSF1R,and PAK1 Correlates with Sensitivity of Leukemia Cells to the Antibiotic Mithramycin

Molecular Biology - Abstract—Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a genetically heterogeneous group of oncological diseases of the hematopoietic system, which are extremely difficult to treat. The...     

Internal initiation of polyuridylic acid translation in bacterial cell-free system

The task of the present work was to answer the question: is the free 5′-end needed for effective translation of a model polyribonucleotide template — polyuridylic acid — in a bacterial (E. coli) cell-free system? For this purpose, the template activities of the original polyuridylic acid with its free 5′-end and the polyuridylic acid with blocked 5′-end were compared in the bacterial cell-free translation system. To block the 5′-end, the cytidylic oligodeoxyribonucleotide with fluorescein residue at its 5′-end and uridylic oligoribonucleotide sequence at its 3′-end, schematically described as FAM(dC)₁₀(rU)₅₀, was covalently attached (ligated) to the 5′-end of the template polyuridylic acid. It was shown that the efficiency of polyphenylalanine synthesis on the 5′-blocked template and on the polyuridylic acid with free 5′-end was virtually the same. It was concluded that bacterial ribosomes are capable of effectively initiating translation at the polyuridylic sequence independently of the 5′-end of template polyribonucleotide, i.e. via an internal initiation mechanism, in the absence of a Shine-Dalgarno sequence and AUG start codon.     

Comparison of protein phylogeny reconstruction methods using natural protein sequences

Comparison of several protein phylogeny reconstruction methods was realized on a set of natural protein sequences. The programs of the PHYLIP package and FastME, PhyML and TreeTop programs were tested. In contrast to several studied programs that used simulated sequences, our results demonstrate the superiority of distance methods over the maximum likelihood method.