Mammalian skin is the largest organ of the body and serves as a barrier to protect the body against chemical, mechanical and pathogenic insults as well as water loss. The epidermis is formed from the primitive ectoderm into a multilayered stratified epithelium, consisting of basal, spinous, granular and outermost cornified...
Organismal development requires a precisely orchestrated transcriptional program to correctly deploy genetic information into the genome. This process requires sophisticated gene regulatory networks at multiple spatial and temporal levels from early embryonic development to adult physiological conditions. Molecular differences that define cell types are set up during the pattern formation...
The spatial and temporal patterning of sequence specific transcription factors (SSTFs) contributes to cell type specification and organ formation during embryogenesis. Homeodomain transcription factors are evolutionally conserved among invertebrate and vertebrate animals. They are responsible for body segmentation and organogenesis. Lbx1 and Pitx2 both are homeodomain transcription factors contributing to...
Cells of the ventrolateral dermomyotome delaminate and migrate into the limb buds where they give rise to all muscles of the limbs. The migratory cells proliferate and form myoblasts, which withdraw from the cell cycle to become terminally differentiated myocytes. The regulatory mechanisms that control the later steps of this...
Molecular genetic and enzymological techniques have been employed to study secondary metabolite biosynthesis. These investigations have focused on two projects: the cloning and heterologous expression of biosynthetic gene clusters from unculturable marine organisms and the characterization of individual enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of the antifungal agent blasticidin S. The...
EF-hand proteins are a conserved family of proteins that are modulated by divalent cations and regulate diverse cellular activities. In the present study we characterized the molecular determinants of myosin regulatory light chain (RLC) interaction with several subunits of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-type glutamate receptor. Myosin RLC is an EF-hand protein...
CTIP2, a novel C2H2 zinc finger protein, is a transcriptional repressor that functions by at least two mechanisms. CTIP2 interacts with and stimulates transcriptional repression mediated by COUP-TF family members. CTIP2 also represses transcription independently of COUP-TF proteins by direct, sequence-specific DNA binding activity. CTIP2 has been implicated in lymphoid...