Relating the Diers formetric measurements with the subjective severity of acute and chronic low back pain.

Background Context: Nonspecific low back pain (LBP) is a common disorder with a high economic, social and psychological burden. Many systems have been developed for evaluating the severity of LBP, though these are mainly based on scoring questionnaires for the functional status of the patients. Objective quantifiable methods relating LBP with anthropometric factors are scarce.

Early postnatal migration and development of layer II pyramidal neurons in the rodent cingulate/retrosplenial cortex.

The cingulate and retrosplenial regions are major components of the dorsomedial (dm) limbic cortex and have been implicated in a range of cognitive functions such as emotion, attention, and spatial memory. While the structure and connectivity of these cortices are well characterized, little is known about their development. Notably, the timing and mode of migration that govern the appropriate positioning of late-born neurons remain unknown.

Hunting interactomes of a membrane protein: obtaining the largest set of voltage-dependent anion channel-interacting protein epitopes.

The identification of epitopes involved in protein-protein interactions is essential for understanding protein structure and function. Large scale efforts, although identifying the interactions, did not always yield these epitopes, could not confirm most of the known interactions, and seemed particularly unsuccessful for native intrinsic membrane proteins. We have developed a fluidics-based approach (non-steady-state kinetics) to obtain the broadest set of the epitopes interacting with a given target and applied it to a phage display methodology optimized for membrane proteins.

Direct measurement of VDAC-actin interaction by surface plasmon resonance.

VDAC--a mitochondrial channel involved in the control of aerobic metabolism and apoptosis--interacts in vitro and in vivo with a wide repertoire of proteins including cytoskeletal elements. A functional interaction between actin and Neurospora crassa VDAC was reported, excluding other VDAC isoforms. From a recent genome-wide screen of the VDAC interactome, we found that human actin is a putative ligand of yeast VDAC.

In vitro interactions between the two mitochondrial membrane proteins VDAC and cytochrome c oxidase.

VDAC, a mitochondrial outer membrane channel, is involved in the control of aerobic metabolism and in apoptotic processes via numerous protein-protein interactions. To unveil those interactions, we screened a human liver cDNA library with the phage display methodology optimized to target VDAC reconstituted into a membrane environment. One positively selected clone yielded a sequence matching a part of the subunit I of human cytochrome c oxidase (COX), a mitochondrial inner membrane enzyme.

Orientation-dependent gene expression with Epstein-Barr virus-derived vectors.

Episomal vectors, described for efficient and regulated expression of heterologous proteins in mammalian cells, have the advantage that they persist in multiple copies in the cell without integrating into the chromosome. To efficiently express heterologous proteins we used such a vector based on elements of the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), namely the sequences coding for Epstein-Barr nuclear antigen 1 and the viral origin of replication. Because constitutive expression is often deleterious to the cell, we combined the interferon-inducible Mx promoter with this EBV-derived vector.