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Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) is a relatively new addition to the expanding category of oncovirus-induced cancers. Although still comparably rare, the number of cases has risen dramatically in recent years. Furt...
Cell and Bioscience is on track to receive its first Impact Factor in mid-2013. What is the role of the Impact Factor as a measure of a journal’s success?
After liver injury, the repair process comprises activation and proliferation of hepatic stellate cells (HSCs), which produce extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor bet...
Nuclear receptors are a family of ligand-activated, DNA sequence-specific transcription factors that regulate various aspects of animal development, cell proliferation, differentiation, and homeostasis. The ph...
Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) protease inhibitors (PIs) are the most potent class of drugs in antiretroviral therapies. However, viral drug resistance to PIs could emerge rapidly thus reducing th...
Golgi phosphoprotein 2 (GOLPH2, also termed GP73 and GOLM1) is a type II transmembrane protein residing in the cis and medial-Golgi cisternae. GOLPH2 is predominantly expressed in the epithelial cells of many ...
Hypoxia is associated with many disease conditions in humans, such as cancer, stroke and traumatic injuries. Hypoxia elicits broad molecular and cellular changes in diverse eukaryotes. Our recent studies sugge...
For over a century, the origin of eukaryotes has been a topic of intense debate among scientists. Although it has become widely accepted that organelles such as the mitochondria and chloroplasts arose via endo...
The Wnt signaling pathway was initially discovered for its role in tumorigenesis and the development of Drosophila and other eukaryotic organisms. The key effector of this pathway, the bipartite transcription fac...
During normal development primordial germ cells (PGCs) derived from the epiblast are the precursors of spermatogonia and oogonia. In culture, PGCs can be induced to dedifferentiate to pluripotent embryonic ger...
RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) is rapidly replacing microarrays for profiling gene expression with much improved accuracy and sensitivity. One of the most common questions in a typical gene profiling experiment is h...
Thyroid hormone (T3) is important for adult organ function and vertebrate development. Amphibian metamorphosis is totally dependent on T3 and offers a unique opportunity to study how T3 controls postembryonic ...
Phosphatases are important regulators of intracellular signaling events, and their functions have been implicated in many biological processes. Dual-specificity phosphatases (DUSPs), whose family currently con...
PDLIM2 is essential for the termination of the inflammatory transcription factors NF-κB and STAT but is dispensable for the development of immune cells and immune tissues/organs. Currently, it remains unknown ...
Excessive loss of pancreatic β-cells, mainly through apoptosis, contributes to the development of diabetic hyperglycemia. Oxidative stress plays a major role in the process of β-cell apoptosis due to low expre...
Mutations in LMNA encoding lamins A and C are associated with at least 10 different degenerative disorders affecting diverse tissues, collectively called laminopathies. A recent study showed that mis-accumulation...
Wounding following whole-body γ-irradiation (radiation combined injury, RCI) increases mortality. Wounding-induced increases in radiation mortality are triggered by sustained activation of inducible nitric oxi...
Glucocorticoids are steroid hormones that play critical and complex roles in the regulation of triglyceride (TG) homeostasis. Depending on physiological states, glucocorticoids can modulate both TG synthesis a...
Caenorhabditis elegans sarcomeres have been studied extensively utilizing both forward and reverse genetic techniques to provide insight into muscle development and the mechanisms behind muscle contraction. A pre...
About 15 types of human papillomavirus (HPV) are classified as high-risk based on their epidemiological link with cervical cancer. These HPV types have deferent degrees of oncogenicity and their distribution a...
Two research groups led by Dr T.C. Wu of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and Dr P. Liu of National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, respectively, have won the 2011 Ming K Jean...
Expression of the human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1) Tax oncoprotein rapidily induces a significant increase of micronuclei (MN) and unstabilized DNA breaks in cells. Unstabilized DNA breaks can have ...
Cell signaling mediated by morphogens is essential to coordinate growth and patterning, two key processes that govern the formation of a complex multi-cellular organism. During growth and patterning, cells are...
Accumulating evidence suggests that various diseases, including many types of cancer, result from alteration of subcellular protein localization and compartmentalization. Therefore, it is worthwhile to expand ...
This months Cell and Bioscience highlights review articles by Mien-Chie Hung on EGFR biology and Yingzi Yang on Wnt signaling. Dr. Hung was the 2011 Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America (SCBA) Presidential...
Retinoic acid (RA) is a morphogen derived from retinol (vitamin A) that plays important roles in cell growth, differentiation, and organogenesis. The production of RA from retinol requires two consecutive enzy...
A novel, cancer-fighting function was recently discovered for Sm ad u biquitination r egulatory f actor 2 (Smurf2).
TGF-β signaling regulates diverse cellular processes, including cell proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, cell plasticity and migration. Its dysfunctions can result in various kinds of diseases, such as ...
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have acquired great interests for their potential use in the clinical therapy of many diseases because of their functions including multiple lineage differentiation, low immunogen...
Expansion of (CTG)n•(CAG)n trinucleotide repeat (TNR) microsatellite sequences is the cause of more than a dozen human neurodegenerative diseases. (CTG)n and (CAG)n repeats form imperfectly base paired hairpins t...
Germline mutations of the BRCA1 tumor suppressor gene are a major cause of familial breast and ovarian cancer. BRCA1 plays critical roles in the DNA damage response that regulates activities of multiple repair an...
The structural maintenance of chromosomes (Smc) proteins regulate nearly all aspects of chromosome biology and are critical for genomic stability. In eukaryotes, six Smc proteins form three heterodimers--Smc1/...
Z-DNA is a higher-energy, left-handed form of the double helix. A primary function of Z-DNA formation is to facilitate transcriptional initiation and activation. Sequences favoring Z-DNA formation are frequent...
In HPV infected cells p53 function is abrogated by E6 and even ectopically expressed p53 is unable to perform tumor suppressor functions. In addition to facilitating its degradation, E6 may also inhibit p53 tr...
The majority of the noncoding regions of mammalian genomes have been found to be transcribed to generate noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), resulting in intense interest in their biological roles. During the past decade...
Smad7 is a key negative regulator of the transforming growth factor β (TGF-β) signaling and plays an important role in modulating a large array of biological processes. The physiological actions of Smad7 have ...
Transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) signaling is tightly regulated at the level of post-translational modification to transmit quantitative difference in ligand concentration into proportional transcriptional...
The TGFβ and Ras-MAPK pathways play critical roles in cell development and cell cycle regulation, as well as in tumor formation and metastasis. In the absence of cellular transformation, these pathways operate...
Smad proteins are classified in different groups based on their functions in mediating transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) superfamily components. Smad1/5/8 mainly mediate bone morphogenetic proteins (BMP) pat...
Smad proteins are the intracellular mediators of transforming growth factor β (TGF-β) signaling. Smads function as transcription factors and their activities require carboxyl-terminal phosphorylation by TGF-β ...
It remains unclear whether retroviruses can encode and express an intragenomic microRNA (miRNA). Some have suggested that processing by the Drosha and Dicer enzymes might preclude the viability of a replicatin...
In the adult vertebrate intestine, multi-potent stem cells continuously generate all of the epithelial cells throughout the adulthood. While it has long been known that the frog intestine is formed via the dev...
Since its discovery, nearly one decade of research on astrocyte elevated gene 1 (AEG-1) has witnessed expanding knowledge of this molecule, ranging from its role in cancer biology to molecular mechanisms under...
Brown adipose tissue in mammals plays a critical role in maintaining energy balance by thermogenesis, which means dissipating energy in the form of heat. It is held that in mammals, long-term surplus food inta...
Cancer cells possess unique metabolic phenotypes that are determined by their underlying oncogenic pathways. Activation of the PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling cascade promotes glycolysis and leads to glucose-dependenc...
Several lines of evidence support the hypothesis that hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) directly interact with the immune system and have potential for immune privilege. Although the microenvironment or niche pr...
Despite detailed in vivo knowledge of glycolytic enolases and many bacterial non-enolase members of the superfamily, little is known about the in vivo function of vertebrate non-enolase enolase superfamily member...
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNA transcripts that affect various cellular pathways by serving as regulators of gene expression at the translational and transcriptional level. Nuclear receptors (NRs)...