Sunday, December 18, 2011

Isolation, characterization, and cDNA cloning of a vampire bat salivary plasminogen activator.

Just think, from 1989 and we've spent all these intervening years going down the rathole of tPA rather than looking at something else like this. tPA is 32% effective and only a miniscule % get it.
http://www.jbc.org/content/264/30/17947.short

Abstract

Vampire bat saliva contains a plasminogen activator that presumably assists these hematophagous animals during feeding. Here, we report that the vampire bat salivary plasminogen activator, Bat-PA, is homologous( having the same or a similar relation) to tissue-type plasminogen activator (t-PA) but contains neither a kringle 2 domain nor a plasmin-sensitive processing site. Three Bat-PA species corresponding to full-length, finger-, and finger- epidermal growth factor homology domain- forms of t-PA have been isolated. Bat-PA(H), the full-length form, was purified and its activity has been characterized. Bat-PA(H) and t-PA are of similar efficacy when monitored for their abilities to catalyze plasminogen activation in the presence of a fibrin cofactor. Interestingly, Bat-PA activity toward plasminogen is stimulated 45,000-fold in the presence of fibrin I; the corresponding value for t-PA is only 205-fold. Bat-PA(H) is the only Bat-PA species which binds tightly to fibrin, although each of the three species exhibit remarkable stimulation by a fibrin cofactor.

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