• The Korean Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.9-14
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• 2016

Adenosine 3',5'-cyclic monophosphate (cAMP) participates in the regulation of numerous cellular functions, including the $Na^+-K^+$-ATPase (sodium pump). Ouabain, used in the treatment of several heart diseases, is known to increase cAMP levels but its effects on the atrium are not understood. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of ouabain on the regulation of atrial cAMP production and its roles in atrial endothelin-1 (ET-1) secretion in isolated perfused beating rabbit atria. Our results showed that ouabain ($3.0{\mu}mol/L$) significantly increased atrial dynamics and cAMP levels during recovery period. The ouabain-increased atrial dynamics was blocked by KB-R7943 ($3.0{\mu}mol/L$), an inhibitor for reverse mode of $Na^+-Ca^{2+}$ exchangers (NCX), but did not by L-type $Ca^{2+}$ channel blocker nifedipine ($1.0{\mu}mol/L$) or protein kinase A (PKA) selective inhibitor H-89 ($3.0{\mu}mol/L$). Ouabain also enhanced atrial intracellular cAMP production in response to forskolin and theophyline ($100.0{\mu}mol/L$), an inhibitor of phosphodiesterase, potentiated the ouabain-induced increase in cAMP. Ouabain and 8-Bromo-cAMP ($0.5{\mu}mol/L$) markedly increased atrial ET-1 secretion, which was blocked by H-89 and by PD98059 ($30{\mu}mol/L$), an inhibitor of extracellular-signal-regulated kinase (ERK) without changing ouabain-induced atrial dynamics. Our results demonstrated that ouabain increases atrial cAMP levels and promotes atrial ET-1 secretion via the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK)/ERK signaling pathway. These findings may explain the development of cardiac hypertrophy in response to digitalis-like compounds.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Crop Science Conference
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• 2017.06a
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• pp.36-36
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• 2017

Out of twenty common protein amino acids, there are many kinds of non protein amino acids (NPAAs) that exist as secondary metabolites and exert ecological functions in plants. Mimosine (Mim), one of those NPAAs derived from L. leucocephala acts as an iron chelator and reversely block mammalian cell cycle at G1/S phases. Cysteine (Cys) is decisive for protein and glutathione that acts as an indispensable sulfur grantor for methionine and many other sulfur-containing secondary products. Cys biosynthesis includes consecutive two steps using two enzymes-serine acetyl transferase (SAT) and O-acetylserine (thiol)lyase (OASTL) and appeared in plant cytosol, chloroplast, and mitochondria. In the first step, the acetylation of the ${\beta}$-hydroxyl of L-serine by acetyl-CoA in the existence of SAT and finally, OASTL triggers ${\alpha}$, ${\beta}$-elimination of acetate from OAS and bind $H_2S$ to catalyze the synthesis of Cys. Mimosine synthase, one of the isozymes of the OASTLs, is able to synthesize Mim with 3-hydroxy-4-pyridone (3H4P) instead of $H_2S$ for Cys in the last step. Thus, the aim of this study was to clone and characterize the cytosolic (Cy) OASTL gene from L. leucocephala, express the recombinant OASTL in Escherichia coli, purify it, do enzyme kinetic analysis, perform docking dynamics simulation analysis between the receptor and the ligands and compare its performance between Cys and Mim synthesis. Cy-OASTL was obtained through both directional degenerate primers corresponding to conserved amino acid region among plant Cys synthase family and the purified protein was 34.3KDa. After cleaving the GST-tag, Cy-OASTL was observed to form mimosine with 3H4P and OAS. The optimum Cys and Mim reaction pH and temperature were 7.5 and $40^{\circ}C$, and 8.0 and $35^{\circ}C$ respectively. Michaelis constant (Km) values of OAS from Cys were higher than the OAS from Mim. Inter fragment interaction energy (IFIE) of substrate OAS-Cy-OASTL complex model showed that Lys, Thr81, Thr77 and Gln150 demonstrated higher attraction force for Cys but 3H4P-mimosine synthase-OAS intermediate complex showed that Gly230, Tyr227, Ala231, Gly228 and Gly232 might provide higher attraction energy for the Mim. It may be concluded that Cy-OASTL demonstrates a dual role in biosynthesis both Cys and Mim and extending the knowledge on the biochemical regulatory mechanism of mimosine and cysteine.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
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• v.32 no.8
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• pp.1095-1103
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• 2019

Objective: Among stress responses, the unfolded protein response (UPR) is a well-known mechanism related to endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. ER stress is induced by a variety of external and environmental factors such as starvation, ischemia, hypoxia, oxidative stress, and heat stress. Inositol requiring enzyme $1{\alpha}$ ($IRE1{\alpha}$)-X-box protein 1 (XBP1) is the most conserved pathway involved in the UPR and is the main component that mediates $IRE1{\alpha}$ signalling to downstream ER-associated degradation (ERAD)- or UPR-related genes. XBP1 is a transcription factor synthesised via a novel mechanism called 'frame switch splicing', and this process has not yet been studied in the horse XBP1 gene. Therefore, the aim of this study was to confirm the frame switch splicing of horse XBP1 and characterise its dynamics using Thoroughbred muscle cells exposed to heat stress. Methods: Primary horse muscle cells were used to investigate heat stress-induced frame switch splicing of horse XBP1. Frame switch splicing was confirmed by sequencing analysis. XBP1 amino acid sequences and promoter sequences of various species were aligned to confirm the sequence homology and to find conserved cis-acting elements, respectively. The expression of the potential XBP1 downstream genes were analysed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. Results: We confirmed that splicing of horse XBP1 mRNA was affected by the duration of thermal stress. Twenty-six nucleotides in the mRNA of XBP1 were deleted after heat stress. The protein sequence and the cis-regulatory elements on the promoter of horse XBP1 are highly conserved among the mammals. Induction of putative downstream genes of horse XBP1 was dependent on the duration of heat stress. We confirmed that both the mechanisms of XBP1 frame switch splicing and various binding elements found in downstream gene promoters are highly evolutionarily conserved. Conclusion: The frame switch splicing of horse XBP1 and its dynamics were highly conserved among species. These results facilitate studies of ER-stress in horse.

• Rapid Communication in Photoscience
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.18-20
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• 2016

Through quantum chemical means, we inspect the energetics of the singlet oxygen formation with fluorescent proteins in their triplet excited states. By placing an oxygen molecule at varying distances, we discover that the energetic driving force for the singlet oxygen formation does not depend strongly on the chromophore $-O_2$ distance. We also observe that the chromophore vibrations contribute much to the energy gap modulation toward the surface crossing. Based on our computational results, we try to draw a series of rationalizations of different photostabilities of different fluorescent proteins. Most prominently, we argue that the chance of encountering a surface crossing point is higher with a protein with a lower photostability.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.33 no.11
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• pp.3597-3600
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• 2012

Thrombin binding aptamter (TBA-15) is a 15-mer guanine-rich oligonucleotide. This DNA apamer specifically binds to the thrombin protein involved in blood coagulation. Using extensive umbrella sampling molecular dynamics simulation method at all atom level, we investigated the potential of mean force (PMF) upon pulling the DNA aptamer from the binding mode of aptamer/thrombin complex. From this calculation, the free energy cost for a full dissociation of this aptamer/protein complex is 17 kcal/mol, indicating a substantial binding affinity of TBA-15. Interestingly, this PMF reveals noticeable plateau regions along the pulling coordinate. Possible structural changes of this complex in the plateau were investigated in details.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.1474-1478
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• 2010

An efficient method for labeling individual proteins in live cells is required for investigations into biological mechanisms and cellular processes. Here we describe the preparation of small quantum dots (QDs) that target membrane surface proteins bearing a hexahistidine-tag ($His_6$-tag) via specific binding to an nitrilotriacetic acid complex of nickel(II) ($NTA{\cdot}Ni^{2+}$) on the QD surfaces. We showed that the $NTA{\cdot}Ni^{2+}$-QDs bound to His-tag functionalized beads as a cellular mimic with high specificity and that QDs successfully targeted $His_6$-tagged vesicle-associated membrane proteins (VMAP) on cell surfaces. This strategy provides an efficient approach to monitoring synaptic protein dynamics in spatially restricted and confined biological environments.

• Journal of the Korean Magnetic Resonance Society
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.45-54
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• 2010

HP1423 (Y1423_HELPY) is a conserved hypothetical protein from H. pylori strain 26695. However, Sequence Blast result indicates that HP1423 belongs to S4 (PF01479) superfamily. According to Pfam database, the S4 domain is a small domain consisting of 60-65 amino acid residues, that probably mediates binding to RNA. In this study, we report the sequence-specific backbone resonance assignment of HP1423, which has 84 amino acid residues. We could assign unambiguously about 88% of all $^{1}H_{N}$, $^{15}N$, $^{13}C_{\alpha}$, $^{13}C_{\beta}$ and $^{13}C=O$ resonances. We could not detect the resonances from residues 15-20, and disappearance of these peaks seems to be related with the intermediate-conformational exchange. These assigned NMR peaks of HP1423 can be used for studying the role of protein dynamics in millisecond timescale, and Protein-RNA binding.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.28 no.12
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• pp.2271-2278
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• 2007

Electron transfer of a redox protein at a bare gold electrode is too slow to observe the redox peaks. A novel Nafion-riboflavin functional membrane was constructed during this study and electron transfer of cytochrome c, superoxide dismutase, and hemoglobin were carried out on the functional membrane-modified gold electrode with good stability and repeatability. The immobilized protein-modified electrodes showed quasireversible electrochemical redox behaviors with formal potentials of 0.150, 0.175, and 0.202 V versus Ag/AgCl for the cytochrome c, superoxide dismutase and hemoglobin, respectively. Whole experiment was carried out in the 50 mM MOPS buffer solution with pH 6.0 at 25 oC. For the immobilized protein, the cathodic transfer coefficients were 0.67, 0.68 and 0.67 and electron transfer-rate constants were evaluated to be 2.25, 2.23 and 2.5 s?1, respectively. Hydrogen peroxide concentration was measured by the peroxidase activity of hemoglobin and our experiment revealed that the enzyme was fully functional while immobilized on the Nafion-riboflavin membrane.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.30 no.11
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• pp.2647-2650
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• 2009

Cold shock proteins (Csps) are a subgroup of the cold-induced proteins on reduction of the growth temperature below the physiological temperature. They preferentially bind to single-stranded nucleic acids to translational regulation via RNA chaperoning. Csp plays important role in cold adaptations for the psychrophilic microorganism. Recently, Cold shock protein from psychrophilic bacteria, Colwellia psychrerythraea (CpCsp) has been identified. Three dimensional structures of a number of Csps from various microorganisms have been solved by NMR spectroscopy or X-ray crystallography, but structures of psychrophilic Csps were not studied yet. Therefore, cloning and purification protocols for further structural study of psychrophilic Csp have been optimized in this study. CpCsp was expressed in E. coli with pET-11a vector system and purified by ion exchange, size exclusion, and reverse phase chromatography. Expression and purification of CpCsp in M9 minimal media was carried out and $^{15}N$-labeled proteins with high purity over 90% was obtained. Further study will be carried out to investigate the tertiary structure and dynamics of CpCsp.

• Journal of the Korean Magnetic Resonance Society
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2022

There are two distinct approaches to improving the quality of protein NMR structures during refinement: all-atom force fields and accumulated knowledge-assisted methods that include Rosetta. Mao et al. reported that, for 40 proteins, Rosetta increased the accuracies of their NMR-determined structures with respect to the X-ray crystal structures (Mao et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 136, 1893 (2014)). In this study, we calculated 32 structures of those studied by Mao et al. using all-atom force field and implicit solvent model, and we compared the results with those obtained from Rosetta. For a single protein, using only the experimental NOE-derived distances and backbone torsion angle restraints, 20 of the lowest energy structures were extracted as an ensemble from 100 generated structures. Restrained simulated annealing by molecular dynamics simulation searched conformational spaces with a total time step of 1-ns. The use of GPU-accelerated AMBER code allowed the calculations to be completed in hours using a single GPU computer-even for proteins larger than 20 kDa. Remarkably, statistical analyses indicated that the structures determined in this way showed overall higher accuracies to their X-ray structures compared to those refined by Rosetta (p-value < 0.01). Our data demonstrate the capability of sophisticated atomistic force fields in refining NMR structures, particularly when they are coupled with the latest GPU-based calculations. The straightforwardness of the protocol allows its use to be extended to all NMR structures.