Open Access Chapters
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page 1 of 4 pages | next »4‑1BB as a Therapeutic Target for Human Disease
Seung-Woo Lee and Michael Croft
4‑1BB (CD137) is being thought of as an attractive target for immunotherapy of many human immune diseases based on encouraging results with 4‑1BB agonistic antibody treatment in mouse models of cancer, autoimmune disease, asthma and additionally as a means to improve vaccination. In this...
A Brief History of the Coronin Family
Eugenio L. de Hostos
What I’d like to do in this chapter is to share with you my recollections from the earliest days of coronin research and then to provide an overview of the still‑developing story of this fascinating family of proteins. In the fall of 1989 I arrived as a postdoc in Guenther Gerisch’s department...
A Common Binding Site for Actin-Binding Proteins on the Actin Surface
Roberto Dominguez
The dynamic remodeling of the actin cytoskeleton plays an essential role in many cellular processes, including cell motility, cytokinesis, and intracellular transport. A large number of actin-binding proteins (ABPs) participate in this process, regulating the assembly of actin filaments into...
A Common Binding Site for Actin-Binding Proteins on the Actin Surface
Roberto Dominguez
The dynamic remodeling of the actin cytoskeleton plays an essential role in many rncellular processes, including cell motility, cytokinesis, and intracellular transport. A rnlarge number of actin-binding proteins (ABPs) participate in this process, regulating the assembly of actin filaments into fun...
A Model Library of Bacterial Chemotaxis on E‑Cell System
Yuri Matsuzaki
Bacterial organisms like Escherichia coli have developed mechanisms to detect and direct cell movement toward substrate when starved. Such behavior is known as chemotaxis (15 for recent review). Some nutrition (amino acids, sugar, etc.) can be sensed by the chemotaxis signal transduction system (Fig...
Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres in Mammalian Cells
Anthony J. Cesare and Roger R. Reddel
For human cells to achieve immortalization they must bypass multiple proliferative checkpoints and acquire a telomere maintenance mechanism to counteract the natural telomere attrition that results from the end‑replication problem. A number of human tumors and cells immortalized in culture mai...
Antioxidant Systems and Oxidative Stress in the Testes
R. John Aitken and Shaun D. Roman
Spermatogenesis is an extremely active replicative process capable of generating approxi- mately 1000 sperm a second. The high rates of cell division inherent in this process imply correspondingly high rates of mitochondrial oxygen consumption by the germinal epithelium. However, the poor vascu...
Applications of Mosquito Ecology for Successful Insect Transgenesis-Based Disease Prevention Programs
Thomas W. Scott, Laura C. Harrington, Bart G. J. Knols and Willem Takken
Successful application of genetically modified mosquitoes (GMMs) for disease prevention requires close collaboration among scientists with a diverse spectrum of expertise. Perspectives ranging from theoretical to empirical-within the context of appropriate ethical, social, and cultural guidelines-wi...
Avoidance of Innate Immune Mechanisms by the Protozoan Parasite, Leishmania spp.
David M. Mosser and Suzanne A. Miles
In this chapter, we will examine the mechanisms by which Leishmania parasites interact with host cells. We will try to develop the hypothesis that the success or failure of Leishmania infections can be traced to the initial mechanism(s) of parasite entry into mononuclear phagocytes. We will try to m...
Bacterial Vectors for RNAi Delivery
Thu Nguyen and Johannes H. Fruehauf
RNA interference (RNAi) is a recently discovered powerful research tool which allows the targeted “silencing” of particular genes. RNAi is also thought to have immense therapeutic potential to treat and prevent a wide range of diseases from inflammation to cancer and to target genes which have forme...
Biological Roles of Prion Domains
Sergey G. Inge-Vechtomov, Galina A. Zhouravleva and Yury O. Chernoff
In vivo amyloid formation is a widespread phenomenon in eukaryotes. Self-perpetuating amyloids provide a basis for the infectious or heritable protein isoforms (prions). At least for some proteins, amyloid-forming potential is conserved in evolution despite divergence of the amino acid (aa) se...
Boomerangs, Bananas and Blimps: Structure and Function of F‑BAR Domains in the Context of the BAR Domain Superfamily
Adam Frost, Vinzenz M. Unger and Pietro De Camilli
Proteins that belong to the BAR (Bin, Amphiphysin, RVS) domain superfamily are alpha‑helical bilayer‑binding modules that have evolved to induce or stabilize membrane curvature during cellular events like endocytosis, cell division and organelle biogenesis. Within the superfamily, a subs...
Calcium Regulation and Signaling in Apicomplexan Parasites
Kisaburo Nagamune, Silvia N. Moreno, Eduardo N. Chini and L. David Sibley
Apicomplexan parasites rely on calcium-mediated signaling for a variety of vital functions including protein secretion, motility, cell invasion, and differentiation. These functions are controlled by a variety of specialized systems for uptake and release of calcium, which acts as a second messenger...
Carbon Nanostructures as a New High-Performance Platform for MR Molecular Imaging
Keith B. Hartman and Lon J. Wilson
Over the last several years, great interest has developed in the potential use of carbon nanostructures (C60 fullerenes and nanotubes) in medicine. In some cases, medical agents derived from these materials have demonstrated greater efficacy than existing clinical agents in many imaging and therapeu...
Carrier Motility
Marcin J. Wozniak and Victoria J. Allan
Membrane traffic pathways require the transport of material between successive or- ganelles, which in neurons may be more than one meter apart. This traffic involves a varied mix of microtubule- and actin-based motility, driven by dynein, kinesin family members and myosins. In this chapter, we ...
Cell-Free Synthesis of Defined Protein Conjugates by Site-Directed Cotranslational Labeling
Michael Gerrits, Jan Strey, Iris Claußnitzer, Uritza von Groll, Frank Schäfer, Martina Rimmele and Wolfgang Stiege
Proteins provided with unique functional groups such as affinity labels or fluorescence moieties offer high potential in many biotechnological or biomedical investigations, e.g., immobilization studies or high throughput screenings. An attractive alternative to known posttranslational methods of pro...
Chaperone Effects on Prion and Nonprion Aggregates
Eugene G. Rikhvanov, Nina V. Romanova and Yury O. Chernoff
Exposure to high temperature or other stresses induces a synthesis of heat shock proteins. Many of these proteins are molecular chaperones, and some of them help cells to cope with heat-induced denaturation and aggregation of other proteins. In the last decade, chaperones have received increas...
Coronin 1 in Innate Immunity
Jean Pieters
The WD repeat containing family of coronin proteins is generally referred to as F‑actin‑interacting proteins. While in lower eukaryotes such as Dictyostelium discoideum, the single short coronin protein regulates several F‑actin dependent processes such as motility, phagocytosis an...
Coronin Structure and Implications
Bernadette McArdle and Andreas Hofmann
Until recently, structural information about coronins was scarce and the earlier identification of five WD40 repeats gave rise to a structural prediction of a five‑bladed β propeller for the N‑terminal domain of these proteins. More detailed analyses revealed the presence of seven W...
Coronin: The Double-Edged Sword of Actin Dynamics
Meghal Gandhi and Bruce L. Goode
Coronin is a conserved actin binding protein that promotes cellular processes that rely on rapid remodeling of the actin cytoskeleton, including endocytosis and cell motility. However, the exact mechanism by which coronin contributes to actin dynamics has remained elusive for many years. Here, we in...
Current and Emerging Approaches to Studying Invasion in Apicomplexan Parasites
Jeffrey Mital and Gary E. Ward
In this chapter, we outline the tools and techniques available to study the process of host cell invasion by apicomplexan parasites and we provide specific examples of how these methods have been used to further our understanding of apicomplexan invasive mechanisms. Throughout the chapter we focus o...
Cytonemes As Cell-Cell Channels in Human Blood Cells
Svetlana Ivanovna Galkina, Anatoly Georgievich Bogdanov, Georgy Natanovich Davidovich and Galina Fedorovna Sud’ina
Human blood cell similar to embryonic and nerve cells can extend thin and very long exten- sions having the same diameter along the entire length called cytonemes. Cytonemes were shown to connect blood cells over a distance of several cell diameters and transport membrane proteins, lipids and i...
Decoding the Signaling Mechanism of Toll-Like Receptor 4 Pathways in Wild Type and Knockouts
Kumar Selvarajoo
The Myeloid Differentiation Primary‑Response Protein 88 (MyD88)‑dependent and—independent pathways induce proinflammatory cytokines when toll‑like receptor 4 (TLR4) is activated through lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulus. Recent studies have implicated a crosstalk mechanism between ...
Distributed Cell Biology Simulations with the E‑Cell System
Masahiro Sugimoto
Analytical techniques in computational cell biology such as kinetic parameter estimation, Metabolic Control Analysis (MCA) and bifurcation analysis require large numbers of repetitive simulation runs with different input parameters. The requirements for significant computational resources imposed by...
Diversity of WD‑Repeat Proteins
Temple F. Smith
The WD‑repeat‑containing proteins form a very large family that is diverse in both its function and domain structure. Within all these proteins the WD‑repeat domains are thought to have two common features: the domain folds into a beta propeller; and the domains form a platform wit...
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