Protein and Peptide Letters - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2011

The microphase adsorption-spectral correction (MPASC) technique was described and applied to the study of the interactions of sodium octanesulfonate (SOS) with human serum albumin (HSA). The aggregation SOS obeys the Langmuir monolayer adsorption. The results show the adsorption ratio of sodium octanesulfonate to HSA is SOS:HSA=18:1. The adsorption constant is KSOS-HSA=4.03×102. The detection li Read More

Protein domain boundary prediction is critical for understanding protein structure and function. In this study, we present a novel method, an order profile domain linker propensity index (OPI), which uses the evolutionary information extracted from the protein sequence frequency profiles calculated from the multiple sequence alignments. A protein sequence is first converted into smooth and normalized numeric order prof Read More

Calmodulin-binding protein-10 (CaMBP10) was isolated previously from Chinese cabbage and identified as a member of the lipid transfer protein family. In this study, we found that CaMBP10 was phosphorylated in a calcium( Ca2+)-dependent manner, and the phosphorylation was inhibited by calmodulin (CaM) antagonists. In-gel kinase assay revealed that the phosphorylation of CaMBP10 was catalyzed by a 45 kDa protein kina Read More

A Surface Plasmon Resonance Imaging (SPRI) sensor has been developed for specific determination of cystatin. The sensor contains immobilised papain, which binds cystatin from solution. Papain activated with N- Hydroxysuccinimide (NHS) and N-Ethyl-N'-(3-dimethyl aminopropyl)carbodiimide (EDC) was immobilized on an amine-modified gold surface. Cysteamine was used for modification of the gold Read More

Plants defend themselves against biotic or abiotic stress by triggering intracellular signaling pathways that regulate gene expression and responses to the offending agent. Phosphorylation and dephosphorylation represent major mechanisms for the regulation of plant defense pathways. Therefore, MAP kinases and phosphatases have been the focus of many studies in this area. This study identified three phosphatase acti Read More

Hepcidin was first identified as an antimicrobial peptide expressed in the liver. It was later demonstrated that hepcidin is in fact the long sought hormone that regulates iron homeostasis in mammals. Hepcidin is encoded as an 84 amino acid prepropeptide that is successively cleaved to yield prohepcidin and the mature 25 amino acid hepcidin. Both the bioactive 25-aa hepcidin and the 35-aa proregion are secreted by liver he Read More

Human mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase is a member of superfamily of multisubunit enzymes, catalyzing the conversion of a broad range of aldehydes to corresponding acids via the NAD (P)+-dependent irreversible reaction. They play an important role in the detoxification of acetaldehyde, in the development of alcohol sensitivity and human alcohol- related disorders. The study aimed to understand the role of Read More

The Golgi apparatus is an important eukaryotic organelle. Successful prediction of Golgi protein types can provide valuable information for elucidating protein functions involved in various biological processes. In this work, a method is proposed by combining a special mode of pseudo amino acid composition (increment of diversity) with the modified Mahalanobis discriminant for predicting Golgi protein types. The benc Read More

A new 15-kDa Bowman-Birk type trypsin inhibitor (termed VFTI-G1) was isolated from the seeds of Faba bean (Vicia faba cv. Giza 843) using cation exchange chromatography on an SP-Sepharose column, anion exchange chromatography on Q-Sepharose and Mono Q columns, and finally size exclusion chromatography on a Superdex 75 column. VFTI-G1 manifested significant antiproteolytic activity against trypsin (5761 BAEE Read More

The use of multi-epitopes has been considered as a promising strategy to overcome the obstacle of antigenic variation in malarial vaccine development. Previously, we constructed a multi-epitope artificial antigen, Malaria Random Constructed Antigen-1(M.RCAg-1), to optimize expression of the antigen, and we subcloned the gene into three prokaryotic expression vectors that contain different fusion tags at the Read More

Coordination of cell growth and cell division is very important for living organisms in order for these to develop harmonically. The present research is concerned with the purification and characterization of a new peptide hormone, namely ZmIGF (Zea mays insulin-like growth factor), which regulates growth and cell division in maize tissues. ZmIGF is a peptide of 5.7 kDa, as determined by mass spectroscopy. It was isolated e Read More

Protein thermodynamic structure theory is an integrated approach to the study of protein dynamics and the mechanisms of enzyme catalysis. In this paper, a hypothesis arising from this theory is examined. The timescale of an enzymatic reaction (TER) gives a key to characterizing enzyme conformational changes. The aspects of timescale important in our approach are: (i) it is logically related to internal motions of the main Read More