Published in Clay Minerals
This paper describes the swelling properties of two highly compacted clays, natural, untreated Wyoming montmorillonite (MX80) and Fourges smectite (FoCa7), saturated with Na and Ca, respectively. The initially compacted samples were hydrated by subjecting them to different suction pressures in a range between 100 MPa and 1 kPa. For each equilibrium...
Published in Chemistry & biology
Neocarazostatin A (NZS) is a bacterial alkaloid with promising bioactivities against free radicals, featuring a tricyclic carbazole nucleus with a prenyl moiety at C-6 of the carbazole ring. Here, we report the discovery and characterization of the biosynthetic pathway of NZS through genome mining and gene inactivation. The in vitro assays characte...
Published in Chemistry & biology
ERβ is regarded as a "tumor suppressor" in breast cancer due to its anti-proliferative effects. However, unlike ERα, ERβ has not been developed as a therapeutic target in breast cancer due to loss of ERβ in aggressive cancers. In a small-molecule library screen for ERβ stabilizers, we identified Diptoindonesin G (Dip G), which significantly increas...
Published in Chemistry & biology
A unique, unsolved O-mannosyl glycan on α-dystroglycan is essential for its interaction with protein ligands in the extracellular matrix. Defective O-mannosylation leads to a group of muscular dystrophies, called dystroglycanopathies. Mutations in isoprenoid synthase domain containing (ISPD) represent the second most common cause of these disorders...
Published in Chemistry & biology
Bromodomains are involved in transcriptional regulation through the recognition of acetyl lysine modifications on diverse proteins. Selective pharmacological modulators of bromodomains are lacking, although the largely hydrophobic nature of the pocket makes these modules attractive targets for small-molecule inhibitors. This work describes the stru...
Published in Chemistry & biology
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) can survive in hypoxic necrotic tissue by assimilating energy from host-derived fatty acids. While the expanded repertoire of β-oxidation auxiliary enzymes is considered crucial for Mtb adaptability, delineating their functional relevance has been challenging. Here, we show that the Mtb fatty acid degradation (FadAB...
Published in Chemistry & biology
Halophilic organisms thrive in environments with extreme salt concentrations and have adapted by allowing molar quantities of cosolutes, mainly KCl, to accumulate in their cytoplasm. To cope with this high intracellular salinity, halophilic organisms modified the chemical composition of their proteins to enrich their surface with acidic and short p...
Published in Chemistry & biology
The phospholipase-catalyzed release of free fatty acids (FFAs) from phospholipids is implicated in many critical biological processes such as neurotransmission, inflammation, and cancer. However, determining the individual change in FFAs generated during these processes has remained challenging due to the limitations of current methods, and has ham...
Published in Chemistry & biology
Tuberculosis (TB) is a recurring threat to contemporary civilization. It affects not only those within developing countries, but has also appeared again in places where it was once considered eradicated. TB co-infection in patients infected by HIV is, at the time of writing, the most common cause of death. In the field of searching for new antimyco...
Published in Chemistry & biology
Here, we report a widely and generally applicable strategy to obtain reliable information in high-throughput protein screenings of enzyme mutant libraries. The method is based on the usage of the split-GFP technology for the normalization of the expression level of each individual protein variant combined with activity measurements, thus resolving ...
