Academia Sinica

About: Academia Sinica is a facility organization based out in Taipei, Taiwan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Galaxy. The organization has 52086 authors who have published 65998 publications receiving 1728114 citations. The organization is also known as: Central Research Academy.

The antiapoptotic gene mcl-1 is up-regulated by the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/Akt signaling pathway through a transcription factor complex containing CREB.

Abstract: mcl-1 is an immediate-early gene activated by the granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and interleukin 3 (IL-3) signaling pathways and plays an important role in the viability response of these cytokines In this study, we demonstrated that cytokine stimulation of mcl-1 mRNA and protein expression were attenuated by pretreatment of cells with phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3-K) inhibitors Reporter gene assays further showed that the PI3-K/Akt signaling pathway was involved in IL-3 activation of mcl-1 gene transcription Analysis of the mcl-1 promoter revealed that both promoter elements, SIE at position -87 and CRE-2 at -70, contribute to IL-3 stimulation of mcl-1 gene expression Although either the SIE site or the CRE-2 site alone was sufficient to confer IL-3 inducibility on a heterologous promoter, only IL-3 activation of the CRE-2 reporter was mediated via the PI3-K/Akt pathway The SIE binding activity was constitutively high in cells deprived of or stimulated by IL-3 In contrast, the CRE-2 binding activity was low in cytokine-starved cells and was strongly induced within 1 h following cytokine treatment of cells In addition, cytokine induction of the CRE-2 but not of the SIE binding activity was dependent on activation of the PI3-K/Akt signaling pathway Lastly, we showed that CREB was one component of the CRE-2 binding complex and played a role in IL-3 activation of the mcl-1 reporter gene Taken together, our results suggest that both PI3-K/Akt-dependent and -independent pathways contribute to the IL-3 activation of mcl-1 gene expression Activation of mcl-1 by the PI3-K/Akt-dependent pathway is through a transcription factor complex containing CREB

Whole proteome prokaryote phylogeny without sequence alignment: a K-string composition approach.

Abstract: A systematic way of inferring evolutionary relatedness of microbial organisms from the oligopeptide content, i.e., frequency of amino acid K-strings in their complete proteomes, is proposed. The new method circumvents the ambiguity of choosing the genes for phylogenetic reconstruction and avoids the necessity of aligning sequences of essentially different length and gene content. The only "parameter" in the method is the length K of the oligopeptides, which serves to tune the "resolution power" of the method. The topology of the trees converges with K increasing. Applied to a total of 109 organisms, including 16 Archaea, 87 Bacteria, and 6 Eukarya, it yields an unrooted tree that agrees with the biologists' "tree of life" based on SSU rRNA comparison in a majority of basic branchings, and especially, in all lower taxa.