Search results for "actions"

The Crystal Structure of Gurmarin, a Sweet Taste–Suppressing Protein: Identification of the Amino Acid Residues Essential for Inhibition

2018

International audience; Gurmarin is a highly specific sweet-taste suppressing protein in rodents that is isolated from the Indian plant Gymnemasylvestre. Gurmarin consists of 35 amino acid residues containing three intramolecular disulfide bridges that form a cystine knot. Here, we report the crystal structure of gurmarin at a 1.45 Å resolution and compare it with previously reported NMR solution structures. The atomic structure at this resolution allowed us to identify a very flexible region consisting of hydrophobic residues. Some of these amino acid residues had been identified as a putative binding site for the rat sweet taste receptor in a previous study. By combining alanine-scanning …

Chaperoning the Mononegavirales: Current Knowledge and Future Directions

2018

This article belongs to the Special Issue Breakthroughs in Viral Replication.

The C-terminal Domains of Apoptotic BH3-only Proteins Mediate Their Insertion into Distinct Biological Membranes

2016

Changes in the equilibrium of pro- and anti-apoptotic members of the B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl-2) protein family in the mitochondrial outer membrane (MOM) induce structural changes that commit cells to apoptosis. Bcl-2 homology-3 (BH3)-only proteins participate in this process by either activating pro-apoptotic effectors or inhibiting anti-apoptotic components and by promoting MOM permeabilization. The association of BH3-only proteins with MOMs is necessary for the activation and amplification of death signals; however, the nature of this association remains controversial, as these proteins lack a canonical transmembrane sequence. Here we used an in vitro expression system to study the inserti…

MycoKey Round Table Discussions of Future Directions in Research on Chemical Detection Methods, Genetics and Biodiversity of Mycotoxins

2018

MycoKey, an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project, includes a series of “Roundtable Discussions” to gather information on trending research areas in the field of mycotoxicology. This paper includes summaries of the Roundtable Discussions on Chemical Detection and Monitoring of mycotoxins and on the role of genetics and biodiversity in mycotoxin production. Discussions were managed by using the nominal group discussion technique, which generates numerous ideas and provides a ranking for those identified as the most important. Four questions were posed for each research area, as well as two questions that were common to both discussions. Test kits, usually antibody based, were one major focus of the…

Proteomics Standards Initiative: Fifteen Years of Progress and Future Work.

2017

Abstract: The Proteomics Standards Initiative (PSI) of the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) has now been developing and promoting open community standards and software tools in the field of proteomics for 15 years. Under the guidance of the chair, co-chairs, and other leadership positions, the PSI working groups are tasked with the development and maintenance of community standards via special workshops and ongoing work. Among the existing, ratified standards, the PSI working groups continue to update PSI-MI XML, MITAB, mzML, mzIdentML, mzQuantML, mzTab, and the MIAPE (Minimum Information About a Proteomics Experiment) guidelines with the advance of new technologies and techniques. Furthe…

The microbiome in respiratory medicine: current challenges and future perspectives

2017

The healthy lung has previously been considered to be a sterile organ because standard microbiological culture techniques consistently yield negative results. However, culture-independent techniques report that large numbers of microorganisms coexist in the lung. There are many unknown aspects in the field, but available reports show that the lower respiratory tract microbiota: 1) is similar in healthy subjects to the oropharyngeal microbiota and dominated by members of the Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria phyla; 2) shows changes in smokers and well-defined differences in chronic respiratory diseases, although the temporal and spatial kinetics of these changes are only partially…

A Methodological Framework to Discover Pharmacogenomic Interactions Based on Random Forests

2021

The identification of genomic alterations in tumor tissues, including somatic mutations, deletions, and gene amplifications, produces large amounts of data, which can be correlated with a diversity of therapeutic responses. We aimed to provide a methodological framework to discover pharmacogenomic interactions based on Random Forests. We matched two databases from the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopaedia (CCLE) project, and the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) project. For a total of 648 shared cell lines, we considered 48,270 gene alterations from CCLE as input features and the area under the dose-response curve (AUC) for 265 drugs from GDSC as the outcomes. A three-step reduction t…

In cutaneous leishmaniasis, induction of retinoic acid in skin-derived Langerhans cells is not sufficient for induction of parasite persistence-media…

2017

The interactions between host glycobiology, bacterial microbiota, and viruses in the gut

2018

Rotavirus (RV) and norovirus (NoV) are the major etiological agents of viral acute gastroenteritis worldwide. Host genetic factors, the histo-blood group antigens (HBGA), are associated with RV and NoV susceptibility and recent findings additionally point to HBGA as a factor modulating the intestinal microbial composition. In vitro and in vivo experiments in animal models established that the microbiota enhances RV and NoV infection, uncovering a triangular interplay between RV and NoV, host glycobiology, and the intestinal microbiota that ultimately influences viral infectivity. Studies on the microbiota composition in individuals displaying different RV and NoV susceptibilities allowed th…

Affinity proteomics identifies novel functional modules related to adhesion GPCRs.

2019

Adhesion G protein-coupled receptors (ADGRs) have recently become a target of intense research. Their unique protein structure, which consists of a G protein-coupled receptor combined with long adhesive extracellular domains, suggests a dual role in cell signaling and adhesion. Despite considerable progress in the understanding of ADGR signaling over the past years, the knowledge about ADGR protein networks is still limited. For most receptors, only a few interaction partners are known thus far. We aimed to identify novel ADGR-interacting partners to shed light on cellular protein networks that rely on ADGR function. For this, we applied affinity proteomics, utilizing tandem affinity purifi…