Herpes simplex virus (HSV) 1 and 2 infect activated T lymphocytes by attachment of the HSV envelope glycoprotein D (gD) to the cellular herpesvirus entry mediator (HVEM), an orphan member of the tumor necrosis factor receptor superfamily. Here, we demonstrate that HVEM binds two cellular ligands, secreted lymphotoxin alpha (LTalpha) and LIGHT, a new member of the TNF superfamily. LIGHT is a 29 kDa type II transmembrane protein produced by activated T cells that also engages the receptor for the LTalphabeta heterotrimer but does not form complexes with either LTalpha or LTbeta. HSV1 gD inhibits the interaction of HVEM with LIGHT, and LIGHT and gD interfere with HVEM-dependent cell entry by HSV1. This characterizes herpesvirus gD as a membrane-bound viokine and establishes LIGHT-HVEM as integral components of the lymphotoxin cytokine-receptor system.

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TRAIL/Apo-2L induces rapid apoptosis of a variety of tumor cell lines. A family of tumor necrosis factor receptorrelated molecules have been identified as receptors for TRAIL. Herein, we report the identification of another member of the TRAIL receptor family, TRUNDD (TRAIL receptor with a truncated death domain). The TRUNDD transcript was detected in multiple human tissues. TRUNDD is highly homologous to all known TRAIL receptors and has an extracellular TRAILbinding domain but lacks a functional intracellular death domain and does not induce apoptosis. Consistent with an inhibitory role, ectopic expression of TRUNDD attenuated TRAIL-induced apoptosis in mammalian cells.z 1998 Federation of European Biochemical Societies.

Dedicated to Professor Ronald G. Douglas on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday GUOLIANG YU are introduced by Gromov and it is not known if the two definitions are equal (see page 28-32 of [14] for more details). The validity of the Novikov conjecture has been established, by a variety of techniques, for many groups [3], [5], [7], [8], [9], [10], [23], [24], [27], mostnotably for fundamental groups of complete manifolds with nonpositive sectional curvature, closed discrete subgroups of Lie groups with finite connected components, and Gromov's hyperbolic groups. Our approach to the Novikov conjecture is coarse geometric in spirit and is based on the descent principle that the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture for a finitely generated group F (as a metric space with a word length metric) implies the strong Novikov conjecture for F if the classifying space BF has the homotopy type of a finite CW-complex [33] (as pointed out by the referee, this descent principle is a C*-algebra version of various descent principles previously known to topologists [4], [5], [11]). Our main new tool is controlled operator K-theory. Controlled operator Ktheory is a refinement of ordinary K-theory, incorporating additional norm and propagation control. Our result on the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture also implies the Gromov-Lawson-Rosenberg conjecture on the nonexistence of Riemannian metrics with positive scalar curvature for compact K(ir, 1)-manifolds when the fundamental group 7r has finite asymptotic dimension as a metric space with a wordlength metric and Gromov's zero-in-the-spectrum conjecture for uniformly contractible Riemannian manifolds with finite asymptotic dimension. Recall that Gromov's zero-in-the-spectrum conjecture says that the spectrum of the Laplacian operator acting on the space of L2-forms of a uniformly contractible Riemannian manifold with bounded geometry contains zero.We shall also construct a proper metric space with infinite asymptotic dimension for which the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture fails. This indicates that our result on the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture is best possible in some sense.I thank Xinhui Jiang for many stimulating conversations and John Roe for explaining to me the descent principle. I also thank the referee for helpful comments. The descent principleIn this section we shall briefly discuss the coarse Baum-Connes conjecture and the descent principle. We remark that C*-algebras in this paper are complex C*-algebras and K-theory is 2-periodic complex topological K-theory.Let X be a proper metric space. Recall that a metric space is called proper if every closed ball in the metric space is compact. An X-module is a separable Hilbert space equipped with a *-representation of Co (X), the algebra NOVIKOV CONJECTURE of all complex-valued continuous functions on X which vaxlish at infinity. An X-module is called nondegenerate if the *-representation of Co(X) is nondegenerate. An X-module is said to be standard if no nonzero function in Co(X) acts as a compact operator.Definition 2.1. Let Hx and Hy b...

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A novel member of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) family has been identified from the human umbilical vein endothelial cell cDNA library, named vascular endothelial growth inhibitor (VEGI). The VEGI gene was mapped to human chromosome 9q32. The cDNA for VEGI encodes a protein of 174 amino acid residues with the characteristics of a type II transmembrane protein. Its amino acid sequence is 20-30% identical to other members of the TNF family. Unlike other members of the TNF family, VEGI is expressed predominantly in endothelial cells. Local production of a secreted form of VEGI via gene transfer caused complete suppression of the growth of MC-38 murine colon cancers in syngeneic C57BL/6 mice. Histological examination showed marked reduction of vascularization in MC-38 tumors that expressed soluble but not membrane-bound VEGI or were transfected with control vector. The conditioned media from soluble VEGI-expressing cells showed marked inhibitory effect on in vitro proliferation of adult bovine aortic endothelial cells. Our data suggest that VEGI is a novel angiogenesis inhibitor of the TNF family and functions in part by directly inhibiting endothelial cell proliferation. The results further suggest that VEGI maybe highly valuable toward angiogenesis-based cancer therapy.