A novel reverse transduction adenoviral array for the functional analysis of shRNA libraries.

Background: The identification of novel drug targets by assessing gene functions is most conveniently achieved by high-throughput loss-of-function RNA interference screening. There is a growing need to employ primary cells in such screenings, since they reflect the physiological situation more closely than transformed cell lines do. Highly miniaturized and parallelized approaches as exemplified by reverse transfection or transduction arrays meet these requirements, hence we verified the applicability of an adenoviral microarray for the elucidation of gene functions in primary cells.

Expressing engineered thymidylate kinase variants in human cells to improve AZT phosphorylation and human immunodeficiency virus inhibition.

The triphosphorylated form of the nucleoside analogue AZT (AZTTP) acts as a chain terminator during reverse transcription of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) genome. The bottleneck in the conversion of AZT to AZTTP is the phosphorylation of AZT monophosphate (AZTMP) by cellular thymidylate kinase. Human thymidylate kinase was engineered to exhibit highly improved activity for AZTMP to AZTDP conversion.

Kirrel2, a novel immunoglobulin superfamily gene expressed primarily in beta cells of the pancreatic islets.

A novel immunoglobulin superfamily (Igsf) protein gene was discovered by computational analysis of human draft genomic DNA, and multiple cDNA clones were obtained. The protein encoded by this gene contains five Ig domains, one transmembrane domain, and an intracellular domain. It has significant similarity with several known Igsf proteins, including Drosophila RST (irregular chiasm C-roughest) protein and mammalian KIRREL (kin of irregular chiasm C-roughest), NEPH1, and NPHS1 (nephrin) proteins.