International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Volume 10, Issue 4

Quantum dot (QD) labeling combined with fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy is proposed as a powerful transduction technique for the detection of DNA hybridization events. Fluorescence lifetime analysis of DNA microarray spots of hybridized QD l...

Beyond their fundamental role in energy metabolism, mitochondria perform a great variety of other important cellular functions. However, the interplayamong these various roles of mitochondria is still poorly understood, and the underlying mechanisms...

Cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) refers to the specific deposition of amyloid fibrils in the leptomeningeal and cerebral blood vessel walls, often causing secondary vascular degenerative changes. Although many kinds of peptides are known to be depos...

In this study we produced transgenic tobacco plants by overexpressing a serine proteinase inhibitor gene, SaPIN2a, from the American black nightshade Solanum americanum under the control of the CaMV 35S promoter using Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediat...

Coenzymes are often considered as remnants of primordial metabolism, but not as hereditary molecules. I suggest that coenzyme-like molecules (CLMs) performed hereditary functions before the emergence of nucleic acids. Autocatalytic CLMs modified (enc...

A key problem in understanding the origin of life is to explain the mechanism(s) that led to the spontaneous assembly of molecular building blocks that ultimately resulted in the appearance of macromolecular structures as they are known in modern bio...

RNA non-enzymatic recombination reactions are of great interest within the hypothesis of the "RNA world", which argues that at some stage of prebiotic life development proteins were not yet engaged in biochemical reactions and RNA carried out both th...

The conformation spaces generated by short hydrophobic-hydrophilic (HP) lattice chains are mapped to conformation space networks (CSNs). The vertices (nodes) of the network are the conformations and the links are the transitions between them. It has...

The mycoestrogen zearalenone (ZEN), as well as its reduced metabolites, which belong to the endocrine disruptor bio-molecule family, are substrates for various enzymes involved in steroid metabolism. In addition to its reduction by the steroid dehydr...

Ethanol withdrawal is linked to elevated oxidative damage to neurons. Here we report our findings on the contribution of phenolic antioxidants (17β-estradiol, p-octyl-phenol and 2,6-di-tert-butyl-4-methylphenol) to counterbalance sudden ethanol withd...

The often observed scarcity of physical-chemical and well as toxicological data hampers the assessment of potentially hazardous chemicals released to the environment. In such cases Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationships/Quantitative Structure-...

In this article we continue our exploration of the historical roots of systems biology by considering the work of William Harvey. Central arguments in his work on the movement of the heart and the circulation of the blood can be shown to presage the...

A set of benzimidazole derivatives were tested for their inhibitory activities against the Gram-negative bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa and minimum inhibitory concentrations were determined for all the compounds. Quantitative structure activity rel...

We have investigated the pathway by which unilamellar POPC liposomes upon adsorption undergo rupture and form a supported lipid bilayer (SLB) on a SiO₂ surface. Biotinylated lipids were selectively incorporated in the outer monolayer of POPC liposome...

Isotope labeling is one of the few methods of revealing the in vivo bidirectionality and compartmentalization of metabolic fluxes within metabolic networks. We argue that a shift from steady state to dynamic isotopomer analysis is required to deal wi...

Amyloid diseases such as Alzheimer’s and thrombosis are characterized by an aberrant assembly of specific proteins or protein fragments into fibrils and plaques that are deposited in various tissues and organs. The single-domain fragment of a camelid...

By mistake, we omitted the support from the National Institutes of Health (U.S.A.) in the Acknowledgements section in our paper recently published in Int. J. Mol. Sci. [1]. Therefore, the Acknowledgements section is revised as follows: [...]

Adenylate kinase and downstream AMP signaling is an integrated metabolic monitoring system which reads the cellular energy state in order to tune and report signals to metabolic sensors. A network of adenylate kinase isoforms (AK1-AK7) are distribute...

In this paper, we study the dielectric properties of water-N,N dimethylformamide (DMF) mixtures over the whole composition range using a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. The static and microwave frequency-dependent dielectric properties of the mix...

Li adsorption on isoreticular MOFs with metal Fe, Cu, Co, Ni and Zn was studied using density function theory. Li functionalization shows a considerable structural change associated with a volume change in isoreticular MOF-5 except for the Zn metal c...

Folding of the Protein G B1 domain (PGB1) shifts with increasing salt concentration from a cooperative assembly of inherently unstructured subdomains to an assembly of partly pre-folded structures. The salt-dependence of pre-folding contributes to th...

The exponential growth over the past several decades in the quantity of both primary sequence data available and the number of protein structures determined has provided a wealth of information describing the relationship between protein primary sequ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the presence of β-lactam-resistant bacteria in six different types of Portuguese cheese. The numbers of ampicillin resistant (AMP^r) bacteria varied from 4.7 x 10² to 1.5 x 10⁷ CFU/g. Within 172 randomly se...

The RNA world hypothesis on the origin of life is generally considered as the key to solve the “chicken and egg dilemma” concerning the evolution of genes and proteins as observed in the modern organisms. This hypothesis, however, contains several se...

The goal of this study was to determine if selected mycotoxins (trichothecenes, aflatoxins, and ochratoxins) could be extracted and identified in human tissue and body fluids from patients exposed to toxin producing molds in their environment. Human...

Kinetic studies of the early events in cytochrome c folding are reviewed with a focus on the evidence for folding intermediates on the submillisecond timescale. Evidence from time-resolved absorption, circular dichroism, magnetic circular dichroism,...

The pattern of flux and concentration control coefficients in an integrated mitochondrial energetics model is examined by applying a generalized matrix method of control analysis to calculate control coefficients, as well as response coefficients The...

Hyperglycemia and elevation of methylglyoxal (MG) are symptoms of diabetes mellitus (DM). In this report, we show that co-treatment of human mononuclear cells (HMNCs) with MG (5 μM) and high glucose (HG; 15 – 30 mM) induces apoptosis or necrosis. HG/...

Silk fibroin from the silkworm, Bombyx mori, has excellent properties such as biocompatibility, biodegradation, non-toxicity, adsorption properties, etc. As a kind of ideal biomaterial, silk fibroin has been widely used since it was first utilized fo...

Studies on production of secondary metabolites by fungi have received a substantial boost lately, particularly with reference to applications of their biological properties in human medicine. Funicones represent a series of related compounds for whic...

We here examine the putative first step in the origin of life: the coalescence of dispersed molecules into a more condensed, organized state. Fresh evidence implies that the driving energy for this coalescence may come in a manner more direct than pr...

Structural variation in the human genome is likely to be an important mechanism for neuronal diversity and brain disease. A combination of multiple different forms of aneuploid cells due to loss or gain of whole chromosomes giving rise to cellular di...