Species-dependent variations in the dielectric activity of membrane skeleton of erythrocytes.

Previously detected βsp and γ1sp dielectric relaxations on the spectrin-based membrane skeleton (MS) of human red blood cells (RBCs) have been shown sensitive to the attachment of MS to the lipid-protein membrane. Such relaxations were now detected on the MS of mammal (rat, horse, bovine, sheep and goat) and "unstrained" chicken RBCs. To become "unstrained" chicken RBCs were subjected consecutively to cold (4°C, >20 h) and either colchicine (15 mM) or vinblastine (30 μM) (4°C, 1 h) that led to irreversible disassembly of their marginal band and an additional portion of their cytoskeleton.

Drug2Gene: an exhaustive resource to explore effectively the drug-target relation network.

Background: Information about drug-target relations is at the heart of drug discovery. There are now dozens of databases providing drug-target interaction data with varying scope, and focus. Therefore, and due to the large chemical space, the overlap of the different data sets is surprisingly small.