201 research outputs found
Characterization of the 8-hydroxyquinoline scaffold for inhibitors of West Nile virus serine protease
West Nile virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne member of flaviviruses that causes significant morbidity and mortality especially among children. There is currently no approved vaccine or antiviral therapeutic for human use. In a previous study, we described compounds containing the 8-hydroxyquinoline (8-HQ) scaffold as inhibitors of WNV serine protease (NS2B/NS3pro) in a high throughput screen (HTS) using the purified WNV NS2B/NS3pro as the target. In this study, we analyzed potencies of some commercially available as well as chemically synthesized derivatives of 8-HQ by biochemical assays. An insight into the contribution of various substitutions of 8-HQ moiety for inhibition of the protease activity was revealed. Most importantly, the substitution of the N1 of the 8-HQ ring by –CH– in compound 26 significantly reduced the inhibition of the viral protease by this naphthalen-1-ol derivative. The kinetic constant (Ki) for the most potent 8-HQ inhibitor (compound 14) with an IC50 value of 2.01 ± 0.08 ?M using the tetra-peptide substrate was determined to be 5.8 ?M. This compound inhibits the WNV NS2B/NS3pro by a competitive mode of inhibition which is supported by molecular modeling
Drug hypersensitivity caused by alteration of the MHC-presented self-peptide repertoire
Idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions are unpredictable, dose independent and
potentially life threatening; this makes them a major factor contributing to
the cost and uncertainty of drug development. Clinical data suggest that many
such reactions involve immune mechanisms, and genetic association studies have
identified strong linkage between drug hypersensitivity reactions to several
drugs and specific HLA alleles. One of the strongest such genetic associations
found has been for the antiviral drug abacavir, which causes severe adverse
reactions exclusively in patients expressing the HLA molecular variant B*57:01.
Abacavir adverse reactions were recently shown to be driven by drug-specific
activation of cytokine-producing, cytotoxic CD8+ T cells that required
HLA-B*57:01 molecules for their function. However, the mechanism by which
abacavir induces this pathologic T cell response remains unclear. Here we show
that abacavir can bind within the F-pocket of the peptide-binding groove of
HLA-B*57:01 thereby altering its specificity. This supports a novel explanation
for HLA-linked idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions; namely that drugs can
alter the repertoire of self-peptides presented to T cells thus causing the
equivalent of an alloreactive T cell response. Indeed, we identified specific
self-peptides that are presented only in the presence of abacavir, and that
were recognized by T cells of hypersensitive patients. The assays we have
established can be applied to test additional compounds with suspected HLA
linked hypersensitivities in vitro. Where successful, these assays could speed
up the discovery and mechanistic understanding of HLA linked hypersensitivities
as well as guide the development of safer drugs
Variability of Luminous Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud Using 10 Years of ASAS Data
Motivated by the detection of a recent outburst of the massive luminous blue
variable LMC-R71, which reached an absolute magnitude M_V = -9.3 mag, we
undertook a systematic study of the optical variability of 1268 massive stars
in the Large Magellanic Cloud, using a recent catalog by Bonanos et al. (2009)
as the input. The ASAS All Star Catalog (Pojmanski 2002) provided well-sampled
light curves of these bright stars spanning 10 years. Combining the two
catalogs resulted in 599 matches, on which we performed a variability search.
We identified 117 variable stars, 38 of which were not known before, despite
their brightness and large amplitude of variation. We found 13 periodic stars
that we classify as eclipsing binary (EB) stars, eight of which are newly
discovered bright, massive eclipsing binaries composed of OB type stars. The
remaining 104 variables are either semi- or non-periodic, the majority (85)
being red supergiants. Most (26) of the newly discovered variables in this
category are also red supergiants with only three B and four O stars.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures and 3 tables; published in A
Correlates of loneliness among university students
Background The purpose of this study was to investigate level of loneliness, essential needs during university education, and relationships between loneliness, essential needs, and characteristics of university students. A sample comprising 721 students participated in the study. The mean age was 21.58 (SD = 1.73) with a range from 18 to 25. The majority of the students were female (70.6%) and were living in students' dormitory (67.5%) with low (87.8%) income, away from their parents. Methods The UCLA-R loneliness scale and sociodemographic questionnaire which includes an open-ended question on essential needs during university education were administered. Pearson-Product-Moment correlations were used to explore the relationships between participants' loneliness, needs, and characteristics. Results It was found that 60.2% of the participants experienced loneliness. Economical support (81.6%), social interaction (46.9%) and psychosocial support (35%) were the essential needs during university education reported by the participants. The study findings indicate that there were significant relationships between the needs of economical support, social interaction, and loneliness level of university students. Results also show that there were significant relationships among romantic relationship, parents' status and loneliness. Participants' loneliness levels were relatively higher who had not any romantic relationship and were not from married families. Conclusion The findings of this study provided essential information, about Turkish university students, concerning: level of loneliness and relationships that exist among loneliness, needs and sociodemographic characteristics. The findings also suggest implications for psychosocial practice. Because of the mean of loneliness were found to be high (45.49 ± 10.07), for this study, professionals need to pay attention to Turkish university students' psychosocial state, and need to empower them in establishing social relations
A theory of -dissipative solvers for scalar conservation laws with discontinuous flux
We propose a general framework for the study of contractive semigroups
of solutions to conservation laws with discontinuous flux. Developing the ideas
of a number of preceding works we claim that the whole admissibility issue is
reduced to the selection of a family of "elementary solutions", which are
certain piecewise constant stationary weak solutions. We refer to such a family
as a "germ". It is well known that (CL) admits many different contractive
semigroups, some of which reflects different physical applications. We revisit
a number of the existing admissibility (or entropy) conditions and identify the
germs that underly these conditions. We devote specific attention to the
anishing viscosity" germ, which is a way to express the "-condition" of
Diehl. For any given germ, we formulate "germ-based" admissibility conditions
in the form of a trace condition on the flux discontinuity line (in the
spirit of Vol'pert) and in the form of a family of global entropy inequalities
(following Kruzhkov and Carrillo). We characterize those germs that lead to the
-contraction property for the associated admissible solutions. Our
approach offers a streamlined and unifying perspective on many of the known
entropy conditions, making it possible to recover earlier uniqueness results
under weaker conditions than before, and to provide new results for other less
studied problems. Several strategies for proving the existence of admissible
solutions are discussed, and existence results are given for fluxes satisfying
some additional conditions. These are based on convergence results either for
the vanishing viscosity method (with standard viscosity or with specific
viscosities "adapted" to the choice of a germ), or for specific germ-adapted
finite volume schemes
Functional Expression of Human Adenine Nucleotide Translocase 4 in Saccharomyces Cerevisiae
The adenine nucleotide translocase (ANT) mediates the exchange of ADP and ATP across the inner mitochondrial membrane. The human genome encodes multiple ANT isoforms that are expressed in a tissue-specific manner. Recently a novel germ cell-specific member of the ANT family, ANT4 (SLC25A31) was identified. Although it is known that targeted depletion of ANT4 in mice resulted in male infertility, the functional biochemical differences between ANT4 and other somatic ANT isoforms remain undetermined. To gain insight into ANT4, we expressed human ANT4 (hANT4) in yeast mitochondria. Unlike the somatic ANT proteins, expression of hANT4 failed to complement an AAC-deficient yeast strain for growth on media requiring mitochondrial respiration. Moreover, overexpression of hANT4 from a multi-copy plasmid interfered with optimal yeast growth. However, mutation of specific amino acids of hANT4 improved yeast mitochondrial expression and supported growth of the AAC-deficient yeast on non-fermentable carbon sources. The mutations affected amino acids predicted to interact with phospholipids, suggesting the importance of lipid interactions for function of this protein. Each mutant hANT4 and the somatic hANTs exhibited similar ADP/ATP exchange kinetics. These data define common and distinct biochemical characteristics of ANT4 in comparison to ANT1, 2 and 3 providing a basis for study of its unique adaptation to germ cells
CD4+ regulatory T cells require CTLA-4 for the maintenance of systemic tolerance
Cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen-4 (CTLA-4) plays a critical role in negatively regulating T cell responses and has also been implicated in the development and function of natural FOXP3+ regulatory T cells. CTLA-4–deficient mice develop fatal, early onset lymphoproliferative disease. However, chimeric mice containing both CTLA-4–deficient and –sufficient bone marrow (BM)–derived cells do not develop disease, indicating that CTLA-4 can act in trans to maintain T cell self-tolerance. Using genetically mixed blastocyst and BM chimaeras as well as in vivo T cell transfer systems, we demonstrate that in vivo regulation of Ctla4−/− T cells in trans by CTLA-4–sufficient T cells is a reversible process that requires the persistent presence of FOXP3+ regulatory T cells with a diverse TCR repertoire. Based on gene expression studies, the regulatory T cells do not appear to act directly on T cells, suggesting they may instead modulate the stimulatory activities of antigen-presenting cells. These results demonstrate that CTLA-4 is absolutely required for FOXP3+ regulatory T cell function in vivo
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