PubMed HealthSearch

SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “assembly”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Assembly of three major subclasses of mouse immunoglobulin G: a theoretical model for covalent assembly in vivo.

A mathematical model, based on second-order reaction kinetics, has been used to describe the covalent assembly of immunoglobulin G(IgG) in vitro from its heavy (H) and light (L) chains (Percy, M.E., Baumal, R., Dorrington, K.J. & Percy, J. (1976) Can. J. Biochem. 54, 675-687). In the present paper, the same model has now been applied to the steady-state assembly of IgG in vivo. This mathematical approach permits a quantitative comparison of the pathways of covalent assembly used by given immunoglobulins in vivo and in vitro. The assumptions in the model are: the species L, H, HL, HH, HHL and LHHL belong to a common pool; incompleted IgG intermediates may freely assemble to form HL, HH, HHL and LHHL; the reaction rate for covalent linkage between any two reacting species is proportional to the products of the number densities of the reactants and to a parameter P which takes the value PHH if the reaction joins two H chains, and PHL if it joins an H and L chain. In vivo values of PHH/PHL were determined for the 18 mouse myeloma tumours and cell lines studied by Baumal et al. (Baumal, R., Potter, M. & Scharff, M. (1971) J. Exp. Med. 134, 1316-1334). From these analyses, we have arrived at the following conclusions: (1) the three major IgG subclasses have distinctive values of PHH/PHL (mean value 53 for IgG1, 12 for IgG2a and 2.8 for IgG2b); (2) for IgGs of the same subclass, the values of PHH/PHL are similar; (3) the mean in vivo values of PHH/PHL are very close to those determined from in vitro assembly experiments. Finally, the individual values of PHH/PHL have been used to simulate pulse-chase experiments in the various tumours and cell lines. Considering the sources and magnitude of experimental error, the theoretical pathways of assembly agree with those determined qualitatively from the pulse-chase experiments.

Cell Line

Microtubule assembly in vitro. Purification of assembly-promoting factors.

The role of microtubule-associated proteins in the assembly of tubulin to microtubules in vitro has been studied. 1. It has been confirmed that pure tubulin obtained by phosphocellulose column chromatography does not significantly assemble in vitro in the absence of minor components which co-polymerize with tubulin. Although tubulin aggregates in a morpholino-ethanesulfonate buffer containing high Mg2+ concentrations, this process was neither inhibited by Ca2+ or colchicine, nor reversed by cold exposure. 2. Microtubule-associated proteins were prepared, either by phosphocellulose column chromatography or by a direct method based on boiling reassembled microtubules in the presence of 2 mM dithiothreitol and 0.75 M NaCl. From each of these preparations two protein fractions were purified, either by Ultrogel ACA34 chromatography or by sucrose gradient ultracentrifugation. The first one, with a high molecular weight, did not promote tubulin assembly; ageing of this material did not induce any activity. On the other hand, the second fraction, with an apparent molecular weight of 70 000 (tau protein), when almost completely purified, was active in promoting assembly. Thus a single specific protein is able to promote assembly of pure tubulin.

Animals

Inability to detect Chlamyodomonas microtubule assembly in vitro: possible implications to the in vivo regulation of microtubule assembly.

It has been demonstrated that the in vitro assembly of microtubules from Chlamydomonas preparations does not occur under a wide range of conditions, including those efficacious for mammalian brain tubulin. This incompetence of Chlamydomonas extracts to form microtubules is independent of the tubulin concentration, the presence of added nucleotides or an added seed, temperature, or the concentration of divalent cation. However, an amorphous aggregate was observed under certain conditions, who composition was mainly tubulin. The in vitro reassembly of microtubules in gerbil brain extracts is inhibited by Chlamydomonas preparations. Fractionation of the Chlamydomonas extracts by column chromatography suggests that the inhibitory component is Chlamydomonas tubulin itself. The mechanism of this inhibition is unknown, but reassembly experiments indicate that the 2 types of tubulins cannot copolymerize. We suggest that the Chlamydomonas tubulin, derived from a cytoplasmic pool, requires to be activated prior to its in vivo polymerization into microtubules.

Animals

Residues on Adeno-associated Virus Capsid Lumen Dictate Interactions and Compatibility with the Assembly-Activating Protein.

The adeno-associated virus (AAV) serves as a broadly used vector system for in vivo gene delivery. The process of AAV capsid assembly remains poorly understood. The viral cofactor assembly-activating protein (AAP) is required for maximum AAV production and has multiple roles in capsid assembly, namely, trafficking of the structural proteins (VP) to the nuclear site of assembly, promoting the stability of VP against multiple degradation pathways, and facilitating stable interactions between VP monomers. The N-terminal 60 amino acids of AAP (AAPN) are essential for these functions. Presumably, AAP must physically interact with VP to execute its multiple functions, but the molecular nature of the AAP-VP interaction is not well understood. Here, we query how structurally related AAVs functionally engage AAP from AAV serotype 2 (AAP2) toward virion assembly. These studies led to the identification of key residues on the lumenal capsid surface that are important for AAP-VP and for VP-VP interactions. Replacing a cluster of glutamic acid residues with a glutamine-rich motif on the conserved VP beta-barrel structure of variants incompatible with AAP2 creates a gain-of-function mutant compatible with AAP2. Conversely, mutating positively charged residues within the hydrophobic region of AAP2 and conserved core domains within AAPN creates a gain-of-function AAP2 mutant that rescues assembly of the incompatible variant. Our results suggest a model for capsid assembly where surface charge/neutrality dictates an interaction between AAPN and the lumenal VP surface to nucleate capsid assembly.IMPORTANCE Efforts to engineer the AAV capsid to gain desirable properties for gene therapy (e.g., tropism, reduced immunogenicity, and higher potency) require that capsid modifications do not affect particle assembly. The relationship between VP and the cofactor that facilitates its assembly, AAP, is central to both assembly preservation and vector production. Understanding the requirements for this compatibility can inform manufacturing strategies to maximize production and reduce costs. Additionally, library-based approaches that simultaneously examine a large number of capsid variants would benefit from a universally functional AAP, which could hedge against overlooking variants with potentially valuable phenotypes that were lost during vector library production due to incompatibility with the cognate AAP. Studying interactions between the structural and nonstructural components of AAV enhances our fundamental knowledge of capsid assembly mechanisms and the protein-protein interactions required for productive assembly of the icosahedral capsid.

Amino Acid Sequence

ONT-only genome assembly of a Korean male individual using a semen sample.

BACKGROUND: Long-read sequencing has enabled the generation of high-quality human genome assemblies, but many previous assemblies were based on blood-derived DNA and often relied on limited data types from a single sequencing strategy. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to generate high-quality phased genome assemblies of a Korean individual using multiple independent long-read datasets produced from a single sequencing platform and to evaluate their utility for chromosome-scale assembly and variant detection. METHODS: Genomic DNA was extracted from a semen sample of a Korean male. Long-read, ultra-long-read, and chromatin conformation capture sequencing data were generated using Oxford Nanopore Technologies. These datasets were integrated to construct phased genome assemblies, followed by correction of noticeable phasing errors and assessment of assembly continuity, chromosomal representation, telomeric repeat recovery, and variant detection performance. RESULTS: The final phased assemblies spanned approximately 2.9 Gb and represented 23 pairs of chromosomes with an NG50 of 150 Mb. Telomeric repeats were detected at 36 and 37 of the 48 chromosomal ends in the two assemblies, indicating high end-to-end completeness. In addition, we successfully identified structural variants, including small variants. These results demonstrate that combining multiple Oxford Nanopore data types can produce highly continuous and informative phased human genome assemblies. CONCLUSIONS: We generated high-quality phased genome assemblies of a Korean individual using Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing data derived from semen DNA. This publicly available genome resource will support broader applications of long-read sequencing in human genomics and variant analysis.

Humans

Autocycler: long-read consensus assembly for bacterial genomes.

MOTIVATION: Long-read sequencing enables complete bacterial genome assemblies, but individual assemblers are imperfect and often produce sequence-level and structural errors. Consensus assembly using Trycycler can improve accuracy, but its lack of automation limits scalability. There is a need for an automated method to generate high-quality consensus bacterial genome assemblies from long-read data. RESULTS: We present Autocycler, a command-line tool for generating accurate bacterial genome assemblies by combining multiple alternative long-read assemblies of the same genome. Without requiring user input, Autocycler builds a compacted De Bruijn graph from the input assemblies, clusters and filters contigs, trims overlaps, and resolves consensus sequences by selecting the most common variant at each locus. It also supports manual curation when desired, allowing users to refine assemblies in challenging or important cases. In our evaluation using Oxford Nanopore Technologies reads from five bacterial isolates, Autocycler outperformed individual assemblers, automated pipelines, and other consensus tools, producing assemblies with lower error rates and improved structural accuracy. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Autocycler is implemented in Rust, open-source, and freely available at github.com/rrwick/Autocycler. It runs on Linux and macOS and is extensively documented.

Genome, Bacterial

Thyroid hormones and neurotubule assembly in vitro during brain development.

A new model has been used to evaluate the effects of thyroid hormones on brain development. This model is based on the assumption that the major effect of thyroid hormones is in regulating the rate of neurite growth of the rat brain at early stages of postnatal development. Microtubules were chosen as markers of neurite growth. We tested, therefore, whether the rate of microtubule assembly in vitro is under thyroid hormone control. The following results were obtained: The rate of tubulin assembly into microtubules in vitro seems to be thyroid hormone dependent: (a) in 15-day-old hypothyroid rats the rates of tubulin assembly in vitro are low, comparable to those levels found in normal rats on day 3; (b) normal rates of assembly in vitro are restored upon addition of very small amounts of microtubule fragments which act as nucleating centers in the process of microtubule formation; (c) addition of microtubule-associated proteins to a hypothyroid preparation restores maximal assembly rates; similar results were obtained on adding one of the microtubule-associated proteins (purified tau protein); (d) physiological amounts of thyroid hormones completely restore normal assembly rates provided that they are administered very early after birth; (e) the ability of tubulin to assemble maximally does not seem to be permanently impaired, since normal assembly rates are spontaneously restored when hypothyroidism is maintained until an adult stage; (f) normal microtubule assembly is observed when hypothyroidism is produced at an adult stage. The model which may be constructed from these results implies that thyroid hormones are required briefly after birth to accelerate the rate of microtubule assembly thus allowing intensive neurite growth during the critical period of brain development.

Aging

Assemblies of particles in the cell membranes of developing, mature and reactive astrocytes.

Orthogonal arrays of small intramembranous particles characterize freeze-fractured astrocytic plasma membranes. The normal variation of assemblies in plasma membranes of subpial astrocytic processes in mature and developing rats was established and compared with assemblies in plasma membranes of reactive astrocytes. In mature rats, subpial astrocytic processes had the greatest number of assemblies. As the parenchyma was approached, this number decreased in each successive layer of astrocytic processes. The advent of assemblies within the plasma membrane is a new criterion of astrocytic differentiation. The foot processes of subpial astrocytes in foetal rats began to acquire assemblies between day 19 and 20 and continued to mature postnatally by a constant addition and rearrangement of assemblies. In contrast to the paucity of assemblies in deeper laminae of the normal brain, reactive astrocytes comprising the lower lamellae in glial scars had an increased number of assemblies while the most striking feature of the superficial, astrocytic processes within the scar was a rearrangement of assemblies. Although the function of these intramembranous particles in still unknown, it appears from our measurements that they are localized primarily in the outermost astrocytic foot process and to a progressively lesser degree in the underlying astrocytic lamellae.

Aging

Agptools: a utility suite for editing genome assemblies.

SUMMARY: The AGP format is a tab-separated table format describing how components of a genome assembly fit together. A standard submission format for genome assemblies is a fasta file giving the sequence of contigs along with an AGP file showing how these components are assembled into larger pieces like scaffolds or chromosomes. For this reason, many scaffolding software pipelines output assemblies in this format. However, although many programs for assembling and scaffolding genomes read and write this format, there is currently no published software for making edits to AGP files when performing assembly curation. We present agptools, a suite of command-line programs that can perform common operations on AGP files, such as breaking and joining sequences, inverting pieces of assembly components, assembling contigs into larger sequences based on an AGP file, and transforming between coordinate systems of different assembly layouts. Additionally, agptools includes an API that writers of other software packages can use to read, write, and manipulate AGP files within their own programs. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code and binaries freely available for download at https://github.com/WarrenLab/agptools, implemented in Python and supported on all operating systems.

Software

Electron microscopic characterization of the defectiveness of a temperature-sensitive mutant of Moloney murine leukemia virus restricted in assembly.

The effect of temperature shiftdown on the assembly of ts3 virions was investigated by both scanning (SEM) and transmission (TEM) electron microscopy. Ts3 is a spontaneous temperature-sensitive mutant of Moloney murine leukemia virus (Mo-MuLV) which previous studies indicated to be defective in assembly or release of the virions. In the present study, both SEM and TEM revealed the following: (i) there were more cell-associated virions in ts3-infected cells grown at the nonpermissive temperature (39 degrees C) than either in cells grown at the permissive temperature (34 degrees C) or in wild-type MuLV-infected cells grown at 39 degrees C; (ii) there were more normal single particles than multiploids (virions with two or more pieces of genomic RNA) in ts3-infected cells grown at the nonpermissive temperature; (iii) there were more multiploids in ts3-infected cells grown at the nonpermissive temperature than either in cells grown at the permissive temperature or in wild-type MuLV-infected cells grown at the nonpermissive temperature; (iv) upon temperature shift from 39 to 34 degrees C, about 90% of the cell-associated virions dissociated from the cell surface. TEM studies also indicated that upon temperature shiftdown, virion assembly rapidly occurred. The above observations suggest that faulty assembly, which results in the production of multiploids, may not be the reason why ts3 virions accumulate on the cell surface at the nonpermissive temperature. The relatively higher proportion of multiploids found in ts3-infected cells grown at 39 degrees C compared with those grown at 34 degrees C may be due to the higher density of budding virions at the cell surface at the nonpermissive temperature, which increases the possibility of two or more particles assembling close to one another. The accumulation of ts3 virions in all stages of assembly at the nonpermissive temperature, together with the fact that rapid assembly and release of ts3 virions occurred on temperature shiftdown, indicates that virion assembly is restricted after it has been initiated. The probable role of altered glycoprotein(s) in restricting virion assembly is discussed.

Cell Line