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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Pancreatic islets manage elevations in blood glucose level by secreting insulin into the bloodstream in a pulsatile manner. Pulsatile insulin secretion is governed by islet oscillations such as bursting electrical activity and periodic...
Inhibition of striated muscle contraction at resting Ca(2+) depends on the C-terminal half of troponin I (TnI) in thin filaments. Much focus has been on a short inhibitory peptide (Ip) sequence within TnI, but structural studies and...
The Z-disk is a complex structure comprising some 40 proteins that are involved in the transmission of force developed during muscle contraction and in important signalling pathways that govern muscle homeostasis. In the Z-disk the ends...
African American (AA) women diagnosed with breast cancer are more likely to have aggressive subtypes. Investigating differentially expressed genes between patient populations may help explain racial health disparities. Resistin, one such...
NMDA receptors are tetrameric ligand-gated ion channels that are crucial for neurodevelopment and higher order processes such as learning and memory, and have been implicated in numerous neurological disorders. The lack of a structure...
Atomic structures of adeno-associated virus (AAV)-DJ, alone and in complex with fondaparinux, have been determined by cryoelectron microscopy at 3 angstrom resolution. The gene therapy vector, AAV-DJ, is a hybrid of natural serotypes...
Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) play intricate roles in cancer progression; some promote invasion and angiogenesis while others suppress tumor growth. For example, human MMP-26/endometase/matrilysin-2 was reported to be either...
A subclass of recently discovered CRISPR repeat RNA in bacteria contains minimally recognizable structural features that facilitate an unknown mechanism of recognition and processing by the Cas6 family of endoribonucleases. Cocrystal...
Development of adipose tissue requires the differentiation of less specialized cells, such as human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs), into adipocytes. Since matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) play critical roles in the cell differentiation...
The functions of many proteins are regulated through allostery, whereby effector binding at a distal site changes the functional activity (e.g., substrate binding affinity or catalytic efficiency) at the active site. Most allosteric...
Late-stage 40S ribosome assembly is a highly regulated dynamic process that occurs in the cytoplasm, alongside the full translation machinery. Seven assembly factors (AFs) regulate and facilitate maturation, but the mechanisms through...
AMPA receptors (AMPARs) mediate fast excitatory neurotransmission in the central nervous system. Functional AMPARs are tetrameric complexes with a highly modular structure, consisting of four evolutionarily distinct structural domains:...
Early in development, neural systems have primarily excitatory coupling, where even GABAergic synapses are excitatory. Many of these systems exhibit spontaneous episodes of activity that have been characterized through both experimental...
It has long been recognized that olfaction and emotion are linked. While chemosensory research using both human and rodent models have indicated a change in emotion can contribute to olfactory dysfunction, there are few studies...
Recently many cellular functions have been associated with membraneless organelles, or protein droplets, formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS). Proteins in these droplets often contain RNA-binding domains, but the effects of...
The roles of electrostatic interactions in protein folding stability have been a matter of debate, largely due to the complexity in the theoretical treatment of these interactions. We have developed computational methods for calculating...
Free energy path sampling plays an essential role in computational understanding of chemical reactions, particularly those occurring in enzymatic environments. Among a variety of molecular dynamics simulation approaches, the generalized...
Ionotropic glutamate receptors (iGluRs) are tetrameric ligand-gated ion channels essential to all aspects of brain function, including higher order processes such as learning and memory. For decades, electrophysiology was the primary...
The many bystander macromolecules in the crowded cellular environments present both steric repulsion and weak attraction to proteins undergoing folding or binding and hence impact the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of these...
Atomic structures of adeno-associated virus (AAV)-DJ, alone and in complex with fondaparinux, have been determined by cryoelectron microscopy at 3 Å resolution. The gene therapy vector, AAV-DJ, is a hybrid of natural serotypes that was...
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) are often involved in signaling and regulatory functions, through binding to cellular targets. Many IDPs undergo disorder-to-order transitions upon binding. Both the binding mechanisms and the...
There are serotonergic projections to both the main (MOB) and the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB). Current-clamp experiments demonstrate that serotonergic afferents are largely excitatory for mitral cells (MCs) in the MOB where 5-HT...
RNA molecules are flexible yet foldable. Proteins must cope with this structural duality when forming biologically active complexes with RNA. Recent studies of the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPRs)...
Clathrin-coated vesicles mediate trafficking of proteins and nutrients in the cell and between organelles. Proteins included in the clathrin-coated vesicles (CCVs) category include clathrin heavy chain (CHC), clathrin light chain (CLC), ...
Juvenile male zebra finches learn their songs over distinct auditory and sensorimotor stages, the former requiring exposure to an adult tutor song pattern. The cortical premotor nucleus HVC (acronym is name) plays a necessary role in...
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) play key roles in signaling and regulation. Many IDPs undergo folding upon binding to their targets. We have proposed that coupled folding and binding of IDPs generally follow a dock-and-coalesce...
Length-dependent axonopathy of the corticospinal tract causes lower limb spasticity and is characteristic of several neurological disorders, including hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Mutations in...
Gene-targeted deletion of the potassium channel Kv1.3 (Kv1.3(-∕-)) results in "Super-smeller" mice with a sensory phenotype that includes an increased olfactory ability linked to changes in olfactory circuitry, increased abundance of...
Whereas protein-ligand binding affinities have long-established prominence, binding rate constants and binding mechanisms have gained increasing attention in recent years. Both new computational methods and new experimental techniques...
The fragile X-related disorders result from expansion of a CGG/CCG microsatellite in the 5' UTR of the FMR1 gene. We have previously demonstrated that the MSH2/MSH3 complex, MutS beta, that is important for mismatch repair, is essential...
The holoenzyme complex of protein kinase A is in an inactive state; activation involves ordered cAMP binding to two tandem domains of the regulatory subunit and release of the catalytic subunit. Deactivation has been less studied, during...
Intranasal insulin delivery is currently being used in clinical trials to test for improvement in human memory and cognition, and in particular, for lessening memory loss attributed to neurodegenerative diseases. Studies have reported...
The gut hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) is a strong moderator of energy homeostasis and communication between the peripheral organs and the brain. GLP-1 signalling occurs in the brain; using a newly developed genetic...
Small ubiquitin-related modifiers (SUMOs) are conjugated to proteins to regulate a variety of cellular processes. SENPs are cysteine proteases with a catalytic center located within a channel between two subdomains that catalyzes SUMO C...
In the tailed bacteriophages, DNA is packaged into spherical procapsids, leading to expansion into angular, thin-walled mature capsids. In many cases, this maturation is accompanied by cleavage of the major capsid protein (CP) and other...
Venom-derived ion channel inhibitors have strong channel selectivity, potency, and stability; however, tracking delivery to their target can be challenging. Herein, we utilized luminescent quantum dots (QDs) conjugated to margatoxin ...
A variety of de novo and inherited missense mutations associated with neurological disorders are found in the NMDA receptor M4 transmembrane helices, which are peripheral to the pore domain in eukaryotic ionotropic glutamate receptors....
The recent high-resolution structure of the thick filament from Lethocerus asynchronous flight muscle shows aspects of thick filament structure never before revealed that may shed some light on how striated muscles function. The...
NMDA receptors are tetrameric ligand-gated ion channels. In the continuous presence of saturating agonists, NMDA receptors undergo stationary gating, in which the channel stochastically switches between an open state that permits ion...
AMPA receptors (AMPARs) mediate fast excitatory neurotransmission in the central nervous system. Functional AMPARs are tetrameric complexes with a highly modular structure, consisting of four evolutionarily distinct structural domains:...
Chemical potential is a fundamental property for determining thermodynamic equilibria involving exchange of molecules, such as between two phases of molecular systems. Previously, we developed the fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based...
Plasma insulin oscillations are known to have physiological importance in the regulation of blood glucose. In insulin-secreting β-cells of pancreatic islets, K(ATP) channels play a key role in regulating glucose-dependent insulin...
Hydrogen sulfide (H2 S), a commonly known toxic gas compound, possesses unique chemical features that allow this small solute molecule to quickly diffuse through cell membranes. Taking advantage of the recent orthogonal space tempering ...
We present the results for CAPRI Round 30, the first joint CASP-CAPRI experiment, which brought together experts from the protein structure prediction and protein-protein docking communities. The Round comprised 25 targets from amongst...
The Dead-box Protein Rok1 Orchestrates 40s And 60s Ribosome Assembly By Promoting The Release Of Rrp5 From Pre-40s Ribosomes To Allow For 60s Maturation
DEAD-box proteins are ubiquitous regulators of RNA biology. While commonly dubbed "helicases, their activities also include duplex annealing, adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-dependent RNA binding, and RNA-protein complex remodeling. Rok1,...
Cas9 is an RNA-guided DNA cleavage enzyme being actively developed for genome editing and gene regulation. To be cleaved by Cas9, a double stranded DNA, or the protospacer, must be complementary to the guide region, typically 20...
Length-dependent axonopathy of the corticospinal tract causes lower limb spasticity and is characteristic of several neurological disorders, including hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Mutations in...
Pancreatic islets respond to elevated blood glucose by secreting pulses of insulin that parallel oscillations in β-cell metabolism, intracellular Ca(2+) concentration, and bursting electrical activity. The mechanisms that maintain an...
A variety of de novo and inherited missense mutations associated with neurological disorders are found in the NMDA receptor M4 transmembrane helices, which are peripheral to the pore domain in eukaryotic ionotropic glutamate receptors....
Myosin-based motility utilizes catalysis of ATP to drive the relative sliding of F-actin and myosin. The earliest detailed model based on cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM) and X-ray crystallography postulated that higher actin affinity...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
