The nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) pathway triggers the degradation of defective mRNAs and governs the expression of mRNAs with specific characteristics. Current understanding indicates that NMD is often significantly suppressed during viral infections to protect the viral genome. In numerous viruses, this inhibition is achieved through direct or indirect interference with the RNA helicase UPF1, thereby promoting viral replication and enhancing pathogenesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTelomeric repeat-binding factor 2 (TRF2) is a subunit of the shelterin protein complex, which binds to and protects telomeres from unwanted DNA damage response (DDR) activation. TRF2 expression plays a pivotal role in aging and cancer, being downregulated during cellular senescence and overexpressed during oncogenesis. Cancers overexpressing TRF2 often exhibit a poor prognosis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe stability of intracellular proteins is highly variable, from a few minutes to several hours, and can be tightly regulated to respond to external and internal cellular environment changes. Several techniques can be used to study the stability of a specific protein, including pulse-chase labeling and blocking of translation. Another approach that has gained interest in recent years is fusing a protein of interest to a fluorescent reporter.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNew therapeutic agents able to block HIV-1 replication are eagerly sought after to increase the possibilities of treatment of resistant viral strains. In this report, we describe a rational strategy to identify small peptide sequences owning the dual property of penetrating within lymphocytes and of binding to a protein target. Such sequences were identified for two important HIV-1 regulatory proteins, Tat and Rev.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnn Trop Med Parasitol
January 1998
Two controlled trials of chloroquine prophylaxis during pregnancy were performed, one in Burkina Faso in 1987, on all pregnant women, and the other in Cameroon in 1992, on primigravidae only. Maternal haematocrit at delivery was found to be significantly higher in those women who had received chloroquine than in those who had not, both in Burkina Faso (37.4% v.
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