Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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 1,323 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

We report nutritional physiology and non-specific immune responses of ascorbic acid (AA) in puffer fish for the first time. This study aimed to examine the essentiality and requirements of AA in diets for the tiger puffer, Takifugu rubripes based on growth performance, liver AA and bone collagen concentration, and non-specific immune responses. Five casein-gelatin based semi-purified diets were formulated to contain five graded levels of l-ascorbyl-2-monophosphate at 0, 40, 80, 160 and 700mg/kg (designated as AMP0, AMP40, AMP80, AMP160 and AMP700, respectively) and fed to triplicate groups of fish. After 10weeks of feeding trial, growth performances of fish (initial body weight, 35g) fed the AMP0 were significantly lower compared to that of fish fed diets supplemented with AMP. The fish fed the AMP0 diet also exhibited significantly lower hematocrit, condition factor and hepatosomatic index compared to the fish fed diets supplemented with AMP. Phagocytic activity (NBT assay) was significantly lower in fish fed the AMP0 diet than in fish fed the AMP containing diets. Plasma lysozyme activity of fish fed the AMP80 and AMP160 was significantly higher than that of fish fed the AMP0. Dietary supplementation of AMP significantly increased the liver superoxide dismutase in the fish. Myeloperoxidase activity of fish fed the AMP0 was significantly lower compared to that of fish fed the AMP containing diets. Bone collagen level tended to increase numerically and total AA concentration in liver of fish was significantly increased in a dose dependent manner by the supplementation of AMP. Therefore, tiger puffer requires exogenous ascorbic acid and the optimum dietary level could be 29mg AA/kg diet for normal growth and physiology. Dietary AA concentration over 82mg/kg could be required to enhance non-specific immune responses of the fish. However, it does not seem that the fish needs an overdose of dietary AA (>160mg/kg) for better non-specific immune responses.
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PMID:Effect of dietary ascorbic acid on growth and non-specific immune responses of tiger puffer, Takifugu rubripes. 1880 40

Antimicrobial (poly)peptides (AMPs) are ancient key effector molecules of innate host defense and have been identified in mammals, insects, plants, and even fungi (Nakatsuji and Gallo, J Invest Dermatol, 132: 887-895, 2012). They exhibit a cationic net charge at physiological pH and are rich in hydrophobic amino acids (Dufourc et al., Curr Protein Pept Sci, 13: 620-631, 2012). Their mode of action has been best investigated in bacteria. When assuming secondary structure the cationic and hydrophobic amino acids are sequestered creating a bipartitioned molecule in which the cationic amino acids mediate initial electrostatic interaction with the negatively charged bacterial surface and the hydrophobic amino acids mediate embedding into the bacterial membranes followed by a multitude of effects interfering with bacterial viability (Nicolas, FEBS J, 276: 6483-6496, 2009; Padovan et al., Curr Protein Pept Sci, 11: 210-219, 2010). However, immunomodulatory, antitumor, and other effects have been added to the ever increasing list of AMP functions (Pushpanathan et al., Int J Pept, 2013: 675391, 2013). Several classes of AMPs have been distinguished based on structure, namely anti-parallel beta-sheet, alpha-helical, circular, as well as disulfide bridge connectivity (Bond and Khalid, Protein Pept Lett, 17: 1313-1327, 2010). Many of the AMPs undergo posttranslational modification including further proteolysis. Biochemical analysis at the protein level is of great interest for a wide range of scientists and important when studying host-pathogen interaction, for example Salmonella invasion of the small intestine. Acid-urea polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (AU-PAGE) followed by Western immunoblotting is an important tool for the identification and quantification of cationic AMPs. The protocol for these procedures outlined here describes, in detail, the necessary steps; including pouring the AU-gels, preparing the test samples, performing the electrophoretic separation and protein transfer to the membrane, and conducting the immunodetection using an alkaline phosphatase/NBT/BCIP system. A standard SDS-PAGE in comparison with AU-PAGE and the corresponding Western immunoblot are depicted in Fig. 1.
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PMID:Detection of antimicrobial (poly)peptides with acid urea polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis followed by Western immunoblot. 2525 51