Bordetella pertussis, the pathogen responsible for whooping cough, releases a soluble calmodulin-sensitive adenylate cyclase into its culture medium. Recently, Confer and Eaton [Confer, D., & Eaton, J. (1982) Science (Washington, D.C.) 217, 948-950], as well as Hanski and Farfel [Hanski, E., & Farfel, Z. (1985) J. Biol. Chem. 290, 5526-5536], have shown that crude extracts from B. pertussis containing adenylate cyclase activity cause elevations in intracellular cAMP when incubated with human neutrophils or lymphocytes. These investigators proposed that the bacterial enzyme enters animal cells and catalyzes the formation of cAMP from intracellular ATP. In this study, B. pertussis adenylate cyclase was purified to remove contaminating islet activating protein and examined for its effects on intracellular cAMP levels of human erythrocytes and N1E-115 mouse neuroblastoma cells. In both cases, the enzyme catalyzed the formation of intracellular cAMP. Addition of calmodulin to the adenylate cyclase preparations completely inhibited formation of intracellular cAMP catalyzed by the bacterial enzyme, indicating that cAMP was not synthesized extracellularly and then taken up by the cells. These experiments illustrate that the bacterial enzyme does enter animal cells and that the enzyme-calmodulin complex does not. 相似文献
Nitric oxide and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2play pivotal roles in both the pathogenesis of osteoarthritis and catabolic processes in articular cartilage. These mediators
are influenced by both IL-1β and mechanical loading, and involve alterations in the inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS)
and cyclo-oxygenase (COX)-2 enzymes. To identify the specific interactions that are activated by both types of stimuli, we
examined the effects of dynamic compression on levels of expression of iNOS and COX-2 and involvement of the p38 mitogen-activated
protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. 相似文献
Wet deposition of dissolved inorganic nitrogen (N) is declining nationally, accompanied by a shift in stoichiometry from predominantly oxidized to reduced forms of N. Stoichiometric trends that include the organic fraction of N wet deposition have yet to be assessed in light of anthropogenic pressures and global change, including shifting seasonality. Here we use 17 years of weekly, year-round wet deposition data from a temperate watershed in New Hampshire (USA) to assess long-term and seasonal trends in NO3?, NH4+, and dissolved organic nitrogen (DON), and quantify the dependence of N stoichiometry on precipitation type (rain or snow). Concentration, load, and relative abundance of DON are increasing, a pattern previously unreported in the U.S. Deposition of total dissolved nitrogen at this site is declining, but is increasingly depleted in NH4+, contrary to national trends. The stoichiometry of inorganic N is highly sensitive to precipitation type with snow containing significantly more NO3? than rain, which was relatively enriched in NH4+. The effects of climate change on seasonality such as warmer winters could result in a greater proportion of precipitation entering the biosphere as rain that is relatively enriched in reduced N, with significant implications for watershed biogeochemical cycles at the regional scale. This study demonstrates variability in contemporary N deposition inputs including trends in stoichiometry and explores the role of organic N and seasonality in regulating inter- and intra- variability in N deposition stoichiometry.
Multiple yeast prions have been identified that result from the structural conversion of proteins into a self-propagating amyloid form. Amyloid-based prion activity in yeast requires a series of discrete steps. First, the prion protein must form an amyloid nucleus that can recruit and structurally convert additional soluble proteins. Subsequently, maintenance of the prion during cell division requires fragmentation of these aggregates to create new heritable propagons. For the Saccharomyces cerevisiae prion protein Sup35, these different activities are encoded by different regions of the Sup35 prion domain. An N-terminal glutamine/asparagine-rich nucleation domain is required for nucleation and fiber growth, while an adjacent oligopeptide repeat domain is largely dispensable for prion nucleation and fiber growth but is required for chaperone-dependent prion maintenance. Although prion activity of glutamine/asparagine-rich proteins is predominantly determined by amino acid composition, the nucleation and oligopeptide repeat domains of Sup35 have distinct compositional requirements. Here, we quantitatively define these compositional requirements in vivo. We show that aromatic residues strongly promote both prion formation and chaperone-dependent prion maintenance. In contrast, nonaromatic hydrophobic residues strongly promote prion formation but inhibit prion propagation. These results provide insight into why some aggregation-prone proteins are unable to propagate as prions. 相似文献
Severe pediatric sepsis continues to be associated with high mortality rates in children. Thus, an important area of biomedical research is to identify biomarkers that can classify sepsis severity and outcomes. The complex and heterogeneous nature of sepsis makes the prospect of the classification of sepsis severity using a single biomarker less likely. Instead, we employ machine learning techniques to validate the use of a multiple biomarkers scoring system to determine the severity of sepsis in critically ill children. The study was based on clinical data and plasma samples provided by a tertiary care center''s Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) from a group of 45 patients with varying sepsis severity at the time of admission. Canonical Correlation Analysis with the Forward Selection and Random Forests methods identified a particular set of biomarkers that included Angiopoietin-1 (Ang-1), Angiopoietin-2 (Ang-2), and Bicarbonate (HCO) as having the strongest correlations with sepsis severity. The robustness and effectiveness of these biomarkers for classifying sepsis severity were validated by constructing a linear Support Vector Machine diagnostic classifier. We also show that the concentrations of Ang-1, Ang-2, and HCO enable predictions of the time dependence of sepsis severity in children. 相似文献
The nuclear yeast two-hybrid (Y2H) system is the most widely used technology for detecting interactions between proteins. A common approach is to screen specific test proteins (baits) against large compilations of randomly cloned proteins (prey libraries). For eukaryotic organisms, libraries have traditionally been generated using messenger RNA (mRNA) extracted from various tissues and cells. Here we present a library construction strategy made possible by ongoing public efforts to establish collections of full-length protein encoding clones. Our approach generates libraries that are essentially normalized and contain both randomly fragmented as well as full-length inserts. We refer to this type of protein-coding clone-derived library as random and full-length (RAFL) Y2H library. The library described here is based on clones from the Mammalian Gene Collection, but our strategy is compatible with the use of any protein-coding clone collection from any organism in any vector and does not require inserts to be devoid of untranslated regions. We tested our prototype human RAFL library against a set of baits that had previously been searched against multiple cDNA libraries. These Y2H searches yielded a combination of novel as well as expected interactions, indicating that the RAFL library constitutes a valuable complement to Y2H cDNA libraries. 相似文献