Forget cellulosic ethanol: If you’ve been following the biofuel sector lately, you probably already know that algae is the hot new game in town. New Zealand-based Aquaflow Bionomic may be getting close to achieving its goal of becoming the world’s first company to viably produce large amounts of biofuel from wild algae. Barrie Leay, [...]

Background:
Oct4 is a POU-domain transcriptional factor which is essential for maintaining pluripotency in several mammalian species. The mouse, human, and bovine Oct4 orthologs display a high conservation of nucleotide sequence and genomic organization.
Results:
Here we report an isolation of a common vole (Microtus rossiaemeridionalis) Oct4 ortholog. Organization and exon-intron structure of vole Oct4 gene are similar [...]

Background:
Human gastrointestinal mucosa regenerates vigorously throughout life, but the factors controlling cell fate in mature mucosa are poorly understood. GATA transcription factors direct cell proliferation and differentiation in many organs, and are implicated in tumorigenesis. GATA-4 and GATA-6 are considered crucial for the formation of murine gastrointestinal mucosa, but their role in human gastrointestinal tract [...]

Background:
Granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) has shown promising results as a cytokine adjuvant for antiviral vaccines and in various models of tumor gene therapy. To explore whether the targeting of antigens to GM-CSF receptors on antigen-presenting cells enhances antigen-specific CD8 T-cell responses, fusion proteins of GM-CSF and ovalbumin (OVA) were expressed by DNA and adenoviral vector [...]

Background:
Currently, there is clear evidence that apoptosis plays an important role in the development and progression of tumors. One of the best characterized apoptosis triggering systems is the CD95/Fas/APO-1 pathway; previous reports have demonstrated high levels of soluble CD95 (sCD95) in serum of patients with some types of cancer. Cervical cancer is the second most [...]