Bruce Bentley

China is enforcing lockdown restrictions in areas around Beijing more intensively, and will mass test the nearby port city of Tianjin, stepping up its quest to wipe out Covid-19 ahead of a key meeting of the Communist Party's top leaders. The moves come even as officials seem to be getting the national case load under control, with 1,556 new infections reported for Sunday in the community. Despite the progress, the country remains focused on eliminating transmission of a virus that most of the world has now accepted as endemic. Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province bordering Beijing, confined residents of four major downtown districts to their homes for three days from Sunday afternoon, saying a mass testing exercise will be undertaken. The city of some 11 million also suspended subway services and halted non-essential business operations in the locked-down districts. The province, home to many workers who commute to the Chinese capital, reported 45 Covid cas...

Cell culture and treatments Human embryonic kidney (HEK293) cells (Korean Cell Bank, Seoul, Korea) were cultured at 37 °C in a humidified atmosphere with 5% CO2 in Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium (GIBCO BRL, Rockville, MD, USA) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (GIBCO BRL) and 1% penicillin and streptomycin (GIBCO BRL). One day before transfection, the cells were seeded in a 6-well culture dish, and then about 1 μg of HA-PAHwt, HA-R241C, and HA-R243Q plasmids were added to each well for transfection. The concentration ranging from 100 to 500 ng of Flag-USP19 was transfected, depending on the experiment. Untransfected HEK293 cells were used as the control. Polyethyleneimine (Polysciences, Warrington, PA, USA) was used according to the manufacturer's protocol to transfect the HEK293 cells. After 48 hours, the cells were harvested. For the CHX assay, cells were transfected with the indicated constructs and incubated for two days. After 48 h of transfection, th...

Defining functional redundancy in mycobacteria. Finding aqueous pores in sodium channels. Identifying new substrates for a ubiquitin ligase. Read about papers on these topics recently published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry . Functional redundancy in mycobacteria The tricarboxylic acid, or TCA, cycle is essential to carbon metabolism. Malate oxidation, a critical step of this cycle, is catalyzed by malate dehydrogenase or malate quinone oxidoreductase. These enzymes, Mdh and Mqo, respectively, tend to co-occur in a single bacterium, and one of them is usually primarily responsible for malate oxidation. Although these proteins are present in most bacteria, the level of functional redundancy remains unclear. NIAID A scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which causes TB. In a recent article in the Journal of Biological Chemistry Liam Harold and collaborators from the University of Otago in New Zealand describe performing a bioinfor...