Long-Residence Time Peptide Antagonist for the Vasopressin V Receptor to Treat Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease.

The dysregulated intracellular cAMP in the kidneys drives cystogenesis and progression in autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD). Mounting evidence supports that vasopressin V receptor (VR) antagonism effectively reduces cAMP levels, validating this receptor as a therapeutic target. Tolvaptan, an FDA-approved VR antagonist, shows limitations in its clinical efficacy for ADPKD treatment.

Mechanism studies of the activation of DNA methyltransferase DNMT1 triggered by histone H3 ubiquitination, revealed by multi-scale molecular dynamics simulations.

DNMT1 is a DNA methyltransferase that catalyzes and maintains methylation in CpG dinucleotides. It blocks the entrance of DNA into the catalytic pocket via the replication foci targeting sequence (RFTS) domain. Recent studies have shown that an H3-tail-conjugated two-mono-ubiquitin mark (H3Ub2) activates DNMT1 by binding to the RFTS domain.

Structural characterization of fungus-specific histone deacetylase Hos3 provides insights into developing selective inhibitors with antifungal activity.

Fungal infection has long been a chronic and even life-threatening problem for humans. The demand for new antifungal drugs has increased dramatically as fungal infections have continued to increase, yet no new classes of drugs have been approved for nearly 15 years due to either high toxicity or development of drug resistance. Thus, validating new drug targets, especially fungus-specific targets, may facilitate future drug design.

Prokaryotic expression, purification, physicochemical properties and antifungal activity analysis of phloem protein PP2-A1 from cucumber.

Phloem protein 2 (PP2) is a protein having lectin properties that can be isolated from the phloem sap. Based on our previous proteomic study of phloem sap of Cucumis sativus, it was found that the expression of PP2 A1-like was significantly up-regulated under salt stress, which may be a molecular mechanism of plant adaptation to stress. This paper carried out the expression and purification of the CsPP2-A1 gene in E.

Extensive studies on linear growth processes with spatiotemporally correlated noise in arbitrary substrate dimensions.

An extensive analytical and numerical study on a class of growth processes with spatiotemporally correlated noise in arbitrary dimension is undertaken. In addition to the conventional investigation on the interface morphology and interfacial widths, we pay special attention to exploring the characteristics of the slope-slope correlation function S(r,t) and the [Q]-th degree residual local interfacial width w[Q](l,t), whose importance has been somewhat overlooked in the literature. Based on the above analysis, we give a plausible theoretical explanation about the various experimental observations of kinetically and thermodynamically unstable surface growth.

Efficient scheme for parametric fitting of data in arbitrary dimensions.

We propose an efficient scheme for parametric fitting expressed in terms of the Legendre polynomials. For continuous systems, our scheme is exact and the derived explicit expression is very helpful for further analytical studies. For discrete systems, our scheme is almost as accurate as the method of singular value decomposition.

On the long-term fitness of cells in periodically switching environments.

Because all the cell populations are capable of making switches between different genetic expression states in response to the environmental change, Thattai and van Oudenaarden (Genetics 167, 523-530, 2004) have raised a very interesting question: In a constantly fluctuating environment, which type of cell population (heterogeneous or homogeneous) is fitter in the long term? This problem is very important to development and evolution biology. We thus take an extensive analysis about how the cell population evolves in a periodically switching environment either with symmetrical time-span or asymmetrical time-span. A complete picture of the phase diagrams for both cases is obtained.

Dynamics of growing surfaces by linear equations in 2+1 dimensions.

An extensive study on the (2+1) -dimensional super-rough growth processes, described by a special class of linear growth equations, is undertaken. This special class of growth equations is of theoretical interests since they are exactly solvable and thus provide a window for understanding the intriguing anomalous scaling behaviors of super-rough interfaces. We first work out the exact solutions of the interfacial heights and the equal-time height difference correlation functions.

Anomalous scaling of superrough growing surfaces: from correlation functions to residual local interfacial widths and scaling exponents.

A study on the (1+1) -dimensional superrough growth processes is undertaken. We first work out the exact relations among the local interfacial width w , the correlation function G , and the pth degree residual local interfacial width w(p) with p=1,2,3,..

Initial-stage growth phenomena and distribution of local configurations of the restricted solid-on-solid model.

We take a detailed study on the restricted solid-on-solid (RSOS) model with finite nearest-neighbor height difference S. We numerically show that, for all finite values of S, the system belongs to the random-deposition (RD) class in the early time stage and then crossovers to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) class. We find that the crossover time scales as Szeta with the crossover exponent zeta=2.

Superroughening by linear growth equations with spatiotemporally correlated noise.

We give an extensive study on a class of interfacial superroughening processes with finite lateral system size in 1+1 dimensions described by linear growth equations with spatiotemporally power-law decaying correlated noise. Since some of these processes have an extremely long relaxation time, we first develop a very efficient method capable of simulating the interface morphology of these growth processes even in very late time. We numerically observe that this class of superrough growth processes indeed gradually develops macroscopic structures with the lateral size comparable to the lateral system size.

Extraction of backgrounds in fluctuating systems.

We undertake an extensive analytical study on the "generalized detrended fluctuation analysis" method, designed to detect the scaling behaviors of fluctuating systems but exclude out the influences of the backgrounds (or the trends). Through our extensive studies, we systematically extract out the exact backgrounds (or the trends) of the fluctuating systems to any order, expressed in terms of the Legendre polynomial. Our results are exact and can be applied to any (1+1)-dimensional continuous fluctuating systems.