Howard Hughes Medical Institute

About: Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Chevy Chase, Maryland, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Gene & RNA. The organization has 20371 authors who have published 34677 publications receiving 5247143 citations. The organization is also known as: HHMI & hhmi.org.

The Pfam protein families database: towards a more sustainable future

Abstract: In the last two years the Pfam database (http://pfam.xfam.org) has undergone a substantial reorganisation to reduce the effort involved in making a release, thereby permitting more frequent releases. Arguably the most significant of these changes is that Pfam is now primarily based on the UniProtKB reference proteomes, with the counts of matched sequences and species reported on the website restricted to this smaller set. Building families on reference proteomes sequences brings greater stability, which decreases the amount of manual curation required to maintain them. It also reduces the number of sequences displayed on the website, whilst still providing access to many important model organisms. Matches to the full UniProtKB database are, however, still available and Pfam annotations for individual UniProtKB sequences can still be retrieved. Some Pfam entries (1.6%) which have no matches to reference proteomes remain; we are working with UniProt to see if sequences from them can be incorporated into reference proteomes. Pfam-B, the automatically-generated supplement to Pfam, has been removed. The current release (Pfam 29.0) includes 16 295 entries and 559 clans. The facility to view the relationship between families within a clan has been improved by the introduction of a new tool.

Weight-Reducing Effects of the Plasma Protein Encoded by the obese Gene

Abstract: The gene product of the ob locus is important in the regulation of body weight. The ob product was shown to be present as a 16-kilodalton protein in mouse and human plasma but was undetectable in plasma from C57BL/6J ob/ob mice. Plasma levels of this protein were increased in diabetic (db) mice, a mutant thought to be resistant to the effects of ob. Daily intraperitoneal injections of either mouse or human recombinant OB protein reduced the body weight of ob/ob mice by 30 percent after 2 weeks of treatment with no apparent toxicity but had no effect on db/db mice. The protein reduced food intake and increased energy expenditure in ob/ob mice. Injections of wild-type mice twice daily with the mouse protein resulted in a sustained 12 percent weight loss, decreased food intake, and a reduction of body fat from 12.2 to 0.7 percent. These data suggest that the OB protein serves an endocrine function to regulate body fat stores.