Charles Y. F. Young

Prostate-specific human kallikrein (hK2) as a novel marker for prostate cancer

Although prostate‐specific antigen (PSA) has aided significantly in the diagnosis of prostate cancer, more sensitive and accurate assays are needed. Presently, we are developing a sensitive immunoassay for hK2 protein for the detection of prostate cancer.

A novel yeast expression system to study androgen action

Publisher Summary Molecular cloning of the mammalian androgen receptors has revealed that the androgen receptor is a member of the steroid/thyroid hormone receptor superfamily of ligand-activated transcription factors. After ligand binding, the activated receptor binds to specific cis-acting elements as homodimers at the 5′ flanking regions of androgen-responsive genes and subsequently regulates gene transcription. Bakers yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has been used as an excellent expression system to study transcriptional activation of mammalian steroid hormone receptors. This chapter extends this novel approach for the study the transcriptional domains of the mouse androgen receptor in yeast cells. The simplicity of culturing yeast cells, the rapid growth rate, and the availability of different yeast plamids and promoters have made this yeast expression system a powerful high throughput screening method to identify novel ligands, agonists or antagonists, for the androgen receptor. By using an ubiquitin-fusion system and a protease-deficient yeast, the chapter discusses strain functional wild-type mouse androgen receptor and several deletion mutants in yeast cells as shown by Western blot analyses.