Catalytic and DNA-Hydrolyzing Activities of Purified Immunoglobulins IgG from Patients Sera with Autoimmune Disease by Pseudobiospecific Chromatography Using Histidyl-Aminohexyl-Sepharose

Catalytic autoimmune antibodies from patients with antiphospholipid (aPL) antibodies were purified using histidyl-aminohexyl-sepharose gel. The sera were loaded on the columns equilibrated with 25 mM MOPS buffer pH 7.4 and the absorbed proteins were eluted by adding 0.2 M NaCl in the equilibrating buffer. Antibodies purity was evaluated by SDS-PAGE. The purified immunoglobulins G from patients with (aPL) sera by histidyl-aminohexyl-sepharose show DNA-degrading activity of the plasmid pUC19 DNA and catalytic activity in hydrolyzing the peptide substrate Pro-Phe-Arg-7-amido-4-methylcoumarin.     

Inhibitors for the immuno- and constitutive proteasome: current and future trends in drug development

Proteolytic degradation is an essential cellular process which is primarily carried out by the 20S proteasome core particle (CP), a protease of 720 kDa and 28 individual subunits. As a result of its central functional role, the proteasome represents an attractive drug target that has been extensively investigated during the last decade and validated by the approval of bortezomib by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Currently, several optimized second‐generation proteasome inhibitors are being explored as anticancer drugs in clinical trials, and most of them target both constitutive proteasomes (cCPs) and immunoproteasomes (iCPs). However, selective inhibition of the iCPs, a distinct class of proteasomes predominantly expressed in immune cells, appears to be a promising therapeutic rationale for the treatment of autoimmune disorders. Although a few selective agents have already been identified, the recently determined crystal structure of the iCP will further promote the development and optimization of iCP‐selective compounds.     

The initial stage of structural transformation of Aβ42 peptides from the human and mole rat in the presence of Fe2+ and Fe3+: Related to Alzheimer's disease

The early stage of secondary structural conversion of amyloid beta (Aβ) to misfolded aggregations is a key feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Under normal physiological conditions, Aβ peptides can protect neurons from the toxicity of highly concentrated metals. However, they become toxic under certain conditions. Under conditions of excess iron, amyloid precursor proteins (APP) become overexpressed. This subsequently increases Aβ production. Experimental studies suggest that Aβ fibrillation (main-pathway) and amorphous (off-pathway) aggregate formations are two competitive pathways driven by factors such as metal binding, pH and temperature. In this study, we performed molecular dynamic (MD) simulations to examine the initial stage of conformational transformations of human Aβ (hAβ) and rat Aβ (rAβ) peptides in the presence of Fe²⁺ and Fe³⁺ ions. Our results demonstrated that Fe²⁺ and Fe³⁺ play key roles in Aβs folding and aggregation. Fe³⁺ had a greater effect than Fe²⁺on Aβs’ folding during intermolecular interactions and subsequently, had a greater effect in decreasing structural diversity. Fe²⁺ was observed to be more likely than Fe³⁺ to interact with nitrogen atoms from the residues of imidazole rings of His. rAβ peptides are more energetically favorable than hAβ for intermolecular interactions and amorphous aggregations. We concluded that most hAβ structures were energetically unfavorable. However, hAβs with intermolecular β-sheet formations in the C-terminal were energetically favorable. It is notable that Fe²⁺ can change the surface charge of hAβ. Furthermore, Fe³⁺ can promote C-terminal folding by binding to Glu22 and Ala42, and by forming stable β-sheet formations on the C-terminal. Fe³⁺ can also pause the main-pathway by inducing random aggregations.     

微量元素与防病治病

介绍了微量元素在防治疾病中的作用及对健康长寿的意义，涉及人体必需微量元素，有害元素，有机锗，微量元素是健康长寿的重要手段以及微量元素与现代文明病。     

Novel functional activities of anti-dna autoantibodies from sera of patients with lymphoproliferative and autoimmune diseases

DNA-hydrolyzing activity of IgG autoantibodies from sera of patients with various types of lymphoproliferative diseases was investigated. The association of DNA-hydrolyzing activity with the antibody (Ab) fraction has been proved by newly developed affinity-capture assay. Study of abzyme incidence in blood tumors and systemic lupus erythematosis (SLE) revealed linkage of anti-DNA Ab catalysts to mature B-cell tumors, and increased probability of DNA-abzymes formation on the background of autoimmune manifestations. These data suggest possible similarity between mechanisms of abzyme formation in SLE and B-cell lymphomas. A new mechanism of formation of DNA-specific catalytic Abs has been proposed based on the increased crossreactivity of polyclonal DNA-abzymes to DNA-depleted nuclear matrix proteins. The possibility of the abzyme production as Ab to the energetically destabilized ground state of the antigen has been discussed. Preliminary results were obtained that indicate the complement-independent cytotoxicity of anti-DNA autoantibodies isolated from blood of patients with SLE and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.     

A new sequence based encoding for prediction of host–pathogen protein interactions

Pathogen–host interactions are very important to figure out the infection process at the molecular level, where pathogen proteins physically bind to human proteins to manipulate critical biological processes in the host cell. Data scarcity and data unavailability are two major problems for computational approaches in the prediction of pathogen–host interactions. Developing a computational method to predict pathogen–host interactions with high accuracy, based on protein sequences alone, is of great importance because it can eliminate these problems. In this study, we propose a novel and robust sequence based feature extraction method, named Location Based Encoding, to predict pathogen–host interactions with machine learning based algorithms. In this context, we use Bacillus Anthracis and Yersinia Pestis data sets as the pathogen organisms and human proteins as the host model to compare our method with sequence based protein encoding methods, which are widely used in the literature, namely amino acid composition, amino acid pair, and conjoint triad. We use these encoding methods with decision trees (Random Forest, j48), statistical (Bayesian Networks, Naive Bayes), and instance based (kNN) classifiers to predict pathogen–host interactions. We conduct different experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. We obtain the best results among all the experiments with RF classifier in terms of F1, accuracy, MCC, and AUC.     

血液病与微量元素关系的研究

研究了血液病与微量元素的关系,发现再生障碍性贫血患者治疗前血清Ｃｕ升高（Ｐ〈０．０５）,缓解后Ｃｕ恢复正常。骨髓增生异常综合征（ＭＤＳ）中ＲＡ＋ＲＡＳ组Ｃｕ及Ｃｕ／Ｚｎ比值高,Ｚｎ值降低不明显;ＲＡＥＢ＋ＲＡＥＢ－Ｔ组Ｃｕ及Ｃｕ／Ｚｎ高,Ｚｎ值明显降低（Ｐ〈０．０５）。急性白血病、淋巴瘤、多发性骨髓瘤及慢粒患者血清Ｃｕ、Ｚｎ及Ｃｕ／Ｚｎ比值与对照组比较均呈显著差异（Ｐ〈０．０５￣０．０１）,而缓解     

New Promising Therapeutic Avenues of Curcumin in Brain Diseases

Curcumin, the dietary polyphenol isolated from Curcuma longa (turmeric), is commonly used as an herb and spice worldwide. Because of its bio-pharmacological effects curcumin is also called “spice of life”, in fact it is recognized that curcumin possesses important proprieties such as anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, antiproliferative, anti-tumoral, and anti-aging. Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Diseases, Parkinson’s Diseases, and Multiple Sclerosis are a group of diseases characterized by a progressive loss of brain structure and function due to neuronal death; at present there is no effective treatment to cure these diseases. The protective effect of curcumin against some neurodegenerative diseases has been proven by in vivo and in vitro studies. The current review highlights the latest findings on the neuroprotective effects of curcumin, its bioavailability, its mechanism of action and its possible application for the prevention or treatment of neurodegenerative disorders.