前沿科技及其它

With 1600 eyes, a pair of antennae, 6 legs, and an open circulatory system, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster may seem an unlikely model for the host of pathologies resulting from human cancers. However, the results of a century of research in Drosophila only accents the fundamental similarit ...

Tumor progression can very broadly be def ined as the progression from a less advanced to a more advanced neoplasm, due to the acquisition of genetic or other cell biologic alterations (Fig. 1). Implicit in this definition is the hypothesis that these acquired cellular alterations endow neopla ...

The functions of many proteins are likely to be regulated by phosphorylation. Thus, antibodies that can recognize specifically phosphorylated sites on proteins have a wide variety of uses for studying the function and regulation of phosphoproteins. We have improved methods for gener ...

Detection of mutations is of central importance in the study of genetic and malignant diseases. Mutation detection helps us in understanding the protein structure, function, and expression. More than that, it is also important for presymptomatic/antenatal diagnosis, confirmati ...

The ubiquitin-dependent proteolysis pathway constitutes a major pathway in the cell for selective protein degradation. The covalent attachment of multiple ubiquitin molecules to lysine residues of a target protein serves to signal its recognition and rapid degradation by the 26S p ...

Studies of human cancer predisposition syndromes and mouse knockout models have revealed several connections between defects in DNA damage response and tumorigenesis. Several recently identified genes, including ATM (ataxia telangiectasia mutated), BRCA1, BRCA2, and Nbs1 ( ...

With recent advances in the Human Genome Project and progress in microarray and gene chip technology, an explosion of genomic information is becoming available. One of the major ways to understand this vast amount of data is by bestowing topological information to help us identify the functio ...

Several approaches, generally referred to as rapid amplification of cDNA ends, are currently used as a means of obtaining full-length cDNA clones by PCR. However, these protocols are not infallible and in specific instances they have proven unsuccessful, emphasizing a need for further ref ...

Gene expression pattern in cancer cells differ significantly from their normal counter parts, owing to mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes, their downstream targets, or owing to increased proliferation, and altered apoptotic potential. Various microarray based t ...

Apoptosis detection methodology is an ever evolving science. The caspase family of cysteine proteases plays a central role in this environmentally conserved mechanism of regulated cell death. New methods that allow for the improved detection and monitoring of the apoptosis-assoc ...

Caspase activity assays in multi-well plate formats represent powerful tools for understanding experimental modulation of the apoptotic response. These assays are configured to exploit functional, biochemical, and temporal differences in substrate specificity and sele ...

Multiplexed assay chemistries provide for multiple measurements of cellular parameters within a single assay well. This experimental practice not only is more cost efficient but provides more informational content about a compound or treatment. For instance, multiplexed casp ...

Protein degradation is mediated predominantly through the ubiquitin–proteasome pathway. The importance of the proteasome in regulating degradation of proteins involved in cell-cycle control, apoptosis, and angiogenesis led to the recognition of the proteasome as a therape ...

Caspases are central to the execution of apoptosis. Their proteolytic activity is responsible for the demise of cells in many physiological and pathological states. Great advances in understanding caspases have been made using recombinant caspase expression and enzymatic chara ...

Here we describe a simple protocol that uses positively charged nylon membrane dot blot to profile miRNA expression. A library of 515 antisense oligodeoxynucleotides of human and mouse mature miRNAs was synthesized and spotted on GeneScreen Plus membrane using a dot-blot equipment. To ...

The extrinsic apoptosis pathway is activated when certain members of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptor superfamily (TNFRSF) are oligomerized by their cognate ligands that are members of the TNF superfamily (TNFSF). The apoptosis-inducing capacity of a member of the TNFRSF reli ...

Twenty-five years ago, Georges K�hler and C�sar Milstein invented a means of cloning individual antibodies, thus opening up the way for tremendous advances in the fields of cell biology and clinical diagnostics (1). However, in spite of their early promise, monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) were l ...

As a consequence of the invention of the hybridoma technology by K�hler and Milstein (1), many monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) have been evaluated in clinical trials since the early 1980s. Clinical outcomes were generally poor (2–5), with the notable exception of marked tumor responses, inclu ...

Conventionally, monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) are generated by fusing B cells from an immunized animal with myeloma cells from the same species (1). Several murine MAb have already been employed for in vivo diagnosis and therapy, including Ber-H2 which recognizes the human CD30 molecule wi ...

For over a century now, antibodies have proven to be extremely useful reagents in biomedical research. They are also being tried as therapeutic agents for a number of intractable diseases. Their uses include identification and cloning of new genes from expression libraries, purification ...