Synthesis and assembly of human vault particles in yeast.

Vault particles are the largest naturally occurring ribonucleoprotein complexes found in the cytoplasm. In all 78 copies of major vault protein (MVP) assemble on polyribosome templates, forming recombinant vault particles, which are of great interest as encapsulation carriers for therapeutics delivery and enzyme stabilization. Baculovirus-insect cell expression is the only system that has been developed for recombinant vault synthesis, but it has low scalability and slow production rate.

Endothelin receptor in osteoblastic cells is coupled to multiple messenger signals.

We analyzed the functional characteristics of endothelin (ET) peptides in the osteoblastic UMR-106 cells by studying receptor binding as well as dose-response curves for ET-1 and ET-3 on two biological responses: 1) induction of Ca2+ transients and 2) activation of the Na(+)-H+ exchanger. ET specifically binds to a single class of receptor with a rank order of affinity ET-1 >> ET-3. ET-1 and ET-3 dose dependently stimulated a rise in intracellular Ca2+ ([Ca2+]i), with ET-1 being two orders of magnitude more potent than ET-3 [50% effective concentration (EC50) = 8 x 10(-10) and 9 x 10(-8) M for ET-1 and ET-3, respectively; P < 0.

Acute phosphate depletion inhibits the Na+/H+ antiporter in a cultured renal cell line.

We studied the effect of acute Pi depletion on the regulation of intracellular pH (pHi) in the OK opossum kidney cell line by using the pH-sensitive dye 2'7'-bis(carboxyethyl)-5(6)-carboxyfluorescein (BCECF). Cell recovery from an NH4Cl acid load in HCO3-free buffer disclosed an Na(+)-dependent component blocked by amiloride and a smaller Na(+)-independent component that increased on exposure of the cells to a high-K+ buffer. After 24-h incubation of the cells in phosphate-free medium, pHi recovery by the Na+/H+ exchanger was markedly inhibited, whereas the Na(+)-independent pHi recovery was not affected.