14102 studies
Both spontaneous and stimulated growth hormone (GH) secretion is reduced in obesity, in which state insensitivity to the inhibitory effect of hyperglycemia also has been reported. To further investigate this point, in eight male obese (OB) patients (…
Very recently, the integrity of capsaicin somatosensory neurons and their protection were suggested to be related to the activity in nociception of a newly discovered 15-amino acid peptide, BPC 157, shown to have strong beneficial effect on intestina…
The superior effectiveness of a new pentadecapeptide, BPC 157, on gastrointestinal and liver lesions, in conjunction with an antiinflammatory and analgetic activity was recently noted. In the present study, BPC 157 was tested as either a protective o…
A 19 kDa protein was identified in specific granules of human neutrophils. A full-length cDNA clone was isolated from a human CML cDNA library, based on amino-acid sequences of isolated tryptic fragments. This clone includes the recently identified c…
A novel protein family, showing a conserved proregion and a variable C-terminal antimicrobial domain, and named cathelicidin, has been identified in mammalian myeloid cells. The conserved proregion shows sequence similarity to members of the cystatin…
alpha-Melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH) antagonizes the binding of interleukin-1 beta (IL-1) to its type I receptors on T cells. IL-1 modulates insulin secretion in the insulin-secreting tumor cell line, HIT-T 15 cells. In the present studies, we…
The effect of taftcine (Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg) and its analog TP-7 (Thr-Lys-Pro-Arg-Pro-Gly-Pro) on rat behavior and serotonin brain exchange was studied in 95 adult male Wistar rats neonatally administered with 5,7-dihydroxytriptamine. Intracutaneous admi…
Cloacal swabs, collected from 756 wild synanthropic and exoanthropic birds of 57 species in the Czech Republic, yielded 32 strains of Salmonella typhimurium [phage types (PT) 141, 104 and 41], six isolates of S. enteritidis (PT 8, 4 and 6e), and one…
Thymosin beta 4 (T beta 4) binds to G-actin in vitro and inhibits actin polymerization. We studied the effects of increasing T beta 4 concentration within living PtK2 cells, comparing its effects on the disassembly of stress fibers and membrane-assoc…
Evidence was accumulated indicating that cyclic nucleotides are involved in regulation of growth, differentiation and function of lymphoid cells. It was previously shown that the N-fragment (1-4) of thymosin beta 4 (Ac-Ser-Asp-Lys-Pro-OH) inhibits in…
The beta 4 and beta 10 thymosins are G-actin binding proteins that exhibit complex patterns of expression during rat cerebellar development. Their expression in vivo is initially high in immature granule cells and diminishes as they migrate and diffe…
Elucidation of cause and effect relationships between gonadal and thymic function can be particularly challenging due to the complexity of interactions among various hormones on thymic function, many of which are largely unknown. To monitor gonadal-t…
We studied the temporal and spatial distribution of the mRNA encoding for thymosin beta 4 (T beta 4), a small acidic actin-sequestering peptide, during the early postimplantation mouse development. Analysis of total embryo RNA demonstrated a strong a…
The levels of thymosin beta 4 mRNA were studied throughout the cell cycle of NIH 3T3 cells. In serum deprived, quiescent cells, the levels of thymosin beta 4 were undetectable; after serum restoration, the cells were induced to proliferate and we fou…
Non-muscle cells contain 15-500 microM actin, a large fraction of which is unpolymerized. Thus, the concentration of unpolymerized actin is well above the critical concentration for polymerization in vitro (0.2 microM). This fraction of actin could b…
An extract of a neuroendocrine tumor of the human pancreas contained a high concentration of insulin and the C-peptide of proinsulin, as determined by radioimmunoassay, together with somatostatin, calcitonin, and thymosin beta 4. Analysis of the mole…
All beta-thymosins studied interact with G-actin in a bimolecular complex and inhibit the polymerization to F-actin under high salt conditions. The interactions between actin and beta-thymosins have been studied under polymerization conditions using…
The thermodynamic basis for actin-based motility of Listeria monocytogenes has been investigated using cytoplasmic extracts of Xenopus eggs, initially developed by Theriot et al. (Theriot, J. A., J. Rosenblatt, D. A. Portnoy, P. J. Goldschmidt-Clermo…
To address the mechanisms through which agonists stimulate actin polymerization, we examined the roles of monomer sequestering proteins and free barbed ends on actin polymerization induced by guanosine 5'-3-O-(thio)triphosphate (GTP gamma S) in neutr…
We performed differential cDNA hybridization using RNA from endothelial cells cultured for 4 hours on either plastic or basement membrane matrix (Matrigel), and identified early genes induced during the morphological differentiation into capillary-li…