Endonuclease domain of the Drosophila melanogaster R2 non-LTR retrotransposon and related retroelements: a new model for transposition.

The molecular mechanisms of the transposition of non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) retrotransposons are not well understood; the key questions of how the 3'-ends of cDNA copies integrate and how site-specific integration occurs remain unresolved. Integration depends on properties of the endonuclease (EN) domain of retrotransposons. Using the EN domain of the Drosophila R2 retrotransposon as a model for other, closely related non-LTR retrotransposons, we investigated the EN domain and found that it resembles archaeal Holliday-junction resolvases.

Expression strategy of densonucleosis virus from the German cockroach, Blattella germanica.

Blattella germanica densovirus (BgDNV) is an autonomous parvovirus that infects the German cockroach. BgDNV possesses three mRNAs for NS proteins, two of which are splice variants of the unspliced transcript. The unspliced variant encodes open reading frame 5 (ORF5) (NS3), while NSspl1 encodes ORF3 (NS1) and ORF4 (NS2) and NSspl2 encodes the C-proximal half of NS1.

Induction and repression of genes of the rat small intestine mucosa with excess and insufficiency of alimentary iron.

Three-month-old Wistar rats were fed with either an iron-deficient diet for 21 days or an iron-excessive diet for 10 days. Fifty thousand clones of a cDNA library of small intestine mucosa were hybridized with two radioactive samples synthesized on mRNA from the small intestine of rats fed with iron-excessive or iron-deficient diets. As a result, genes were found with mRNA level depending on the content of alimentary iron.

Isolation and characterization of the bovine kappa-casein gene.

1. The bovine kappa-casein gene has been isolated as a series of overlapping lambda clones and shown to consist of five exons distributed over a total length of approximately 13 kb. Most of the mature protein-coding sequence is contained in a single large exon.