Myotubularin-related protein 14 (MTMR14) is a novel phosphoinositide phosphatase with roles in the maintenance of normal muscle performance, autophagy, and aging in mice. Our initial pilot study demonstrated t...
Authors: Yin Lv, Lu Xue, Congli Cai, Qing-Hua Liu and Jinhua Shen
One mechanism of resistance of the melanoma-associated BRAF kinase to its small molecule inhibitor vemurafenib is by point mutations in its intron 8 resulting in exons 4–8 skipping. In this report, we carried ...
Excessive apoptosis of airway epithelium is reported to induce airway remodeling and inhibited airway epithelium repair is highly associated with development of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease...
Authors: Chun-Hsiang Lin, Yu-Chuan Hong and Shao-Hsuan Kao
Inflammatory processes and metabolic alterations are supposed to substantially interact. Recently, cumulating reports describe a profound role of interleukin(IL)-22 in this relationship. IL-22 is a particular ...
RNA interference (RNAi) is a robust tool for inhibiting specific gene expression, but it is limited by the uncertain efficiency of siRNA or shRNA constructs. It has been shown that the overexpression of ARGONA...
Authors: Jiening He, Lian Huang, Huiling Qiu, Jiexuan Li, Lan Luo, Yanjiao Li, Shengli Tian, Kang Kang, Jun Luo, Lin Liu and Deming Gou
The initiation of hepatitis B virus (HBV) replication involves the formation of covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA) and its transcription into pregenomic RNA (pgRNA) in hepatocyte nuclei. The regulatory me...
Authors: Hui Wang, KeHui Liu, Bernard A. M. Fang, HaiQing Wu, FengDi Li, XiaoGang Xiang, WeiLiang Tang, GangDe Zhao, LanYi Lin, Shisan Bao and Qing Xie
Exposure to a moderate to high dose of ionizing radiation (IR) not only causes acute radiation syndrome but also induces long-term (LT) bone marrow (BM) injury. The latter effect of IR is primarily attributed ...
Authors: Chengcheng Li, Lu Lu, Junling Zhang, Song Huang, Yonghua Xing, Mingfeng Zhao, Daohong Zhou, Deguan Li and Aimin Meng
Use of low doses of digitalis to prevent the development of heart failure was advocated decades ago, but conflicting results of early animal studies dissuaded further research on this issue. Recent discoverie...
Authors: Jian Wu, Daxiang Li, Lingling Du, Mustafa Baldawi, Marjorie E. Gable, Amir Askari and Lijun Liu
Nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) is a family of inducible transcription factors that plays a vital role in different aspects of immune responses. NF-κB is normally sequestered in the cytoplasm as inactive complexes v...
Skeletal muscle fibers are generally classified into two groups: slow (type I) and fast (type II). Fibers in each group are uniquely designed for specific locomotory needs based on their intrinsic cellular pro...
Authors: Victor M. Luna, Eriko Daikoku and Fumihito Ono
The directed differentiation of mesenchymal
stem cells (MSCs) is tightly controlled by a complex network. Wnt signaling pathways have an important function in controlling the fate of MSCs. However, the mechan...
The tumor suppressor protein, promyelocytic leukemia protein (PML), was originally identified in acute promyelocytic leukemia due to a chromosomal translocation between chromosomes 15 and 17. PML is the core c...
Tens of thousands of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been discovered in eukarya, but their functions are largely unknown. Fortunately, lncRNA–protein interactions may offer details of how lncRNAs play impo...
Authors: Yongfang Yang, Liwei Wen and Hongliang Zhu
Hepatocyte nuclear factor-1beta (HNF1β) was initially identified as a liver-specific transcription factor. It is a homeobox transcription factor that functions as a homodimer or heterodimer with HNF1α. HNF1β p...
Some inherited coagulation factor deficiencies are caused by intracellular retention or degradation of misfolded proteins, and chemical chaperones have been shown to reverse protein misfolding. The purpose of ...
Authors: Maria Eugenia Chollet, Ellen Skarpen, Nina Iversen, Per Morten Sandset and Grethe Skretting
MicroRNA-720 (miR-720), a nonclassical miRNA, is involved in the initiation and progression of several tumors. In our previous studies, miR-720 was shown to be significantly upregulated in cervical cancer tiss...
Authors: Yunlan Tang, Yi Lin, Chuang Li, Xunwu Hu, Yi Liu, Mingyang He, Jun Luo, Guihong Sun, Tao Wang, Wenxin Li and Mingxiong Guo
Zinc ferrite nanoparticles (NPs) have shown potential to be used in biomedical field such as magnetic resonance imaging and hyperthermia. However, there is limited information concerning the biological respons...
Authors: Hisham A. Alhadlaq, Mohd Javed Akhtar and Maqusood Ahamed
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a heterogeneous disease that is associated with a gradual accumulation of genetic and epigenetic alterations. Among all CRC stages, stage II tumors are highly heterogeneous with a hi...
Authors: Jialing Zhang, Bin Yan, Stephan Stanislaw Späth, Hu Qun, Shaleeka Cornelius, Daogang Guan, Jiaofang Shao, Koichi Hagiwara, Carter Van Waes, Zhong Chen, Xiulan Su and Yongyi Bi
I
t is established that adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) produce and secrete cytokines/growth factors that antagonize mucosal injury. However, the exact molecular basis underlying the treatment effects exert...
Authors: Xiao Xu, Liang Li, Cheng Wang, Yang Liu, Chong Chen, Junling Yan, Hong Ding and Su-yang Tang
Deamination of adenine can occur spontaneously under physiological conditions generating the highly mutagenic lesion, hypoxanthine. This process is enhanced by ROS from exposure of DNA to ionizing radiation, U...
Authors: Chia-Chia Lee, Ya-Chien Yang, Steven D. Goodman, Shi Chen, Teng-Yung Huang, Wern-Cherng Cheng, Liang-In Lin and Woei-horng Fang
Preclinical evaluations of chemotherapies depend on clinically relevant animal models for pancreatic cancer. The injection of syngeneic murine adenocarcinoma cells is one efficient option to generate carcinoma...
Authors: Dietmar Zechner, Florian Bürtin, Jonas Amme, Tobias Lindner, Tobias Radecke, Stefan Hadlich, Jens-Peter Kühn and Brigitte Vollmar
Human DNA topoisomerase II-binding protein 1 (hTopBP1) plays an important role in DNA replication and the DNA damage checkpoint pathway. The human mutY homolog (hMYH) is a base excision repair DNA glycosylase ...
Authors: Se Hee Han, Soo-Hyun Hahm, An Hue Vy Tran, Ji Hyung Chung, Myoung-Ki Hong, Hyun-Dong Paik, Key-Sun Kim and Ye Sun Han
The human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) genome (~9 kb RNA) is flanked by two long terminal repeats (LTR) promoter regions with nine open reading frames, which encode Gag, Pol and Env polyproteins, four...
Authors: Joseph Nkeze, Lin Li, Zsigmond Benko, Ge Li and Richard Y Zhao
Actinins are one of the major actin cross-linking proteins found in virtually all cell types and are the ancestral proteins of a larger family that includes spectrin, dystrophin and utrophin. Invertebrates hav...
The overall goal of this study was to demonstrate potential chemopreventive effects of ferulic acid (FA), an antioxidant, combined with aspirin (ASP), a commonly used anti-inflammatory drug for pancreatic canc...
Authors: Arvind Thakkar, Sushma Chenreddy, Jeffrey Wang and Sunil Prabhu
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a severe disease with high morbidity and mortality. Methods that promote repair of the injured kidney have been extensively investigated. Cell-based therapy with mesenchymal stem c...
Authors: Qing Li, Shou-fu Tian, Ye Guo, Xin Niu, Bin Hu, Shang-chun Guo, Nian-song Wang and Yang Wang
Invasion and metastasis are malignant phenotypes in cancer that lead to patient death. Cell motility is involved in these processes. In 1998, we identified overexpression of the actin-bundling protein actinin-...
Mutations in the Alpha-actinin-4 gene (ACTN4) cause a rare form of familial focal segmental glomerulosclerosis in humans. Individuals with kidney disease-associated ACTN4 mutations tend to have mild to moderat...
Authors: Di Feng, Clark DuMontier and Martin R Pollak
The physiological and pathological roles of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in the regulation of cardiovascular functions have been recognized. H2S protects against the hypoxia/reoxygenation (H/R)-induced injury and apopt...
Pten plays a crucial role in the stem cell maintenance in a few organs. Pten defect also causes the premature oocytes and ovary aging. We and other groups have found that the phosphati...
Authors: Wei Zhou, Hongfang Shao, Di Zhang, Jian Dong, Wei Cheng, Lu Wang, Yincheng Teng and Zhuo Yu
RNA–protein interactions play important roles in gene expression control. These interactions are mediated by several recurring RNA-binding motifs including a well-known and characterized ribonucleoprotein moti...
Authors: Ying Liu, Jinfeng Liu, Zenyuan Wang and Johnny J He
Adult hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are maintained in a microenvironment, known as niche in the endosteal regions of the bone marrow. This stem cell niche with low oxygen tension requires HSCs to adopt a uni...
Authors: Fatih Kocabas, Li Xie, Jingjing Xie, Zhuo Yu, Ralph J. DeBerardinis, Wataru Kimura, SuWannee Thet, Ahmed F. Elshamy, Hesham Abouellail, Shalini Muralidhar, Xiaoye Liu, Chiqi Chen, Hesham A. Sadek, Cheng Cheng Zhang and Junke Zheng
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most commonly diagnosed solid tumor and the second leading cancer death in the United States, and also one of the major cancer-related deaths in Chinese. Androgen deprivation thera...
Authors: Yu-Wei Chou, Fen-Fen Lin, Sakthivel Muniyan, Frank C Lin, Ching-Shih Chen, Jue Wang, Chao-Cheng Huang and Ming-Fong Lin
Due to their high proliferative requirements, tumorigenic cells possess altered metabolic systems whereby cells utilize higher quantities of glutamine and glucose. These altered metabolic requirements make it ...
Authors: Michelle Helen Visagie, Thandi Vuyelwa Mqoco, Leon Liebenberg, Edward Henry Mathews, George Edward Mathews and Anna Margaretha Joubert
Under inflammatory conditions or during tumor progression macrophages acquire distinct phenotypes, with factors of the microenvironment such as hypoxia and transforming growth factor β (TGFβ) shaping their fun...
Authors: Wei Cui, Jie Zhou, Nathalie Dehne and Bernhard Brüne
DNA vaccines have emerged as attractive candidates for the control of human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated malignancies. However, DNA vaccines suffer from limited immunogenicity and thus strategies to enhance...
Authors: Benjamin Yang, Andrew Yang, Shiwen Peng, Xiaowu Pang, Richard B.S. Roden, T.-C. Wu and Chien-Fu Hung
Type I interferons (IFN-Is) serve as mediators of antiviral innate immunity and also regulate adaptive immune responses. The molecular mechanism that regulates virus-induced IFN-I production, particularly in t...
Authors: Yichuan Xiao, Jin Jin, Qiang Zou, Hongbo Hu, Xuhong Cheng and Shao-Cong Sun
The Clustered Regions of Interspersed Palindromic Repeats-Cas9 (CRISPR/Cas9), a viral defense system found in bacteria and archaea, has emerged as a tour de force genome editing tool. The CRISPR/Cas9 system is mu...
Authors: Sean M. Riordan, Daniel P. Heruth, Li Q. Zhang and Shui Qing Ye
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding regulatory RNAs that regulate gene expression post-transcriptionally by either inhibiting protein translation or degrading target mRNAs. The differential expression profi...
Authors: Lei Zhou, Fan Liu, Xiaomin Wang and Gaoliang Ouyang
Leishmaniases are caused by obligate intracellular protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania. They cause a spectrum of diseases, most notably visceral (VL), cutaneous (CL), and mucosal (ML) leishmaniasis, which...
Authors: Milena de Paiva-Cavalcanti, Rayana Carla Silva de Morais, Rômulo Pessoa-e-Silva, Lays Adrianne Mendonça Trajano-Silva, Suênia da Cunha Gonçalves-de-Albuquerque, Diego de Hollanda Cavalcanti Tavares, Maria Carolina Accioly Brelaz-de-Castro, Rafael de Freitas e Silva and Valéria Rêgo Alves Pereira
P53 is most well-known for its tumor suppressive function in differentiated cells. Its activities in embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are, however, less well understood. For many years it was thought that p53 is no...
One major challenge in gene therapy is the host immune responses against viral vectors. Previous studies indicate the involvement of NK cells in stunted gene expression in viral vector mediated gene therapy. T...
Authors: Manjunatha Ankathatti Munegowda and Jim Hu
Adipogenesis is tightly controlled by a complex network of transcription factors acting at different stages of differentiation. Kruppel-like factors (KLFs) as a family of zinc-finger transcription factors play...
Authors: Shuzhong Jiang, Hongkui Wei, Tongxing Song, Yang Yang, Feng Zhang, Yuanfei Zhou, Jian Peng and Siwen Jiang
The induction of alloantigen-specific immune tolerance is the “Holy-Grail” in transplantation. Although it had been previously demonstrated that transient depletion of T cells through apoptosis could lead to l...
Authors: Ruixia Kuang, Sylvain Perruche and WanJun Chen
Burkholderia pseudomallei is an emerging pathogen that causes melioidosis, a serious and potentially fatal disease which requires prolonged antibiotics to prevent relapse. However, diagnosis of...
Authors: Susanna K. P. Lau, Ching-Wan Lam, Shirly O. T. Curreem, Kim-Chung Lee, Wang-Ngai Chow, Candy C. Y. Lau, Siddharth Sridhar, Sally C. Y. Wong, Paolo Martelli, Suk-Wai Hui, Kwok-Yung Yuen and Patrick C. Y. Woo
Interleukin-22 (IL-22), a cytokine with important functions in anti-microbial defense and tissue repair, has been recently suggested to have beneficial effects in obesity and metabolic syndrome in some but not...
Authors: Ogyi Park, Sung Hwan Ki, Mingjiang Xu, Hua Wang, Dechun Feng, Joseph Tam, Douglas Osei-Hyiaman, George Kunos and Bin Gao
Aberrant DNA methylation at the 5-carbon on cytosine residues (5mC) in CpG dinucleotides is probably the most extensively characterized epigenetic modification in colon cancer. It has been suggested that the l...
Authors: Yue Guo, Jong Hun Lee, Limin Shu, Ying Huang, Wenji Li, Chengyue Zhang, Anne Yuqing Yang, Sarandeep SS Boyanapalli, Ansu Perekatt, Ronald P Hart, Michael Verzi and Ah-Ng Tony Kong
Mycoepoxydiene (MED) is a polyketide that can be isolated from a marine fungus and is associated with various activities, including antitumor and anti-inflammatory functions. However, its effects on atheroscle...
Authors: Xiaochun Xia, Yang Li, Qiang Su, Zhengrong Huang, Yuemao Shen, Weihua Li and Chundong Yu
Three research groups led by Dr. Robert Clarke of Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA; Dr. Lixin Wei of Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China; and Dr. Zhiming Zhang of Xiamen Univ...
