Search results for "formation"
showing 10 items of 21020 documents
Molecular Insights Into Therapeutic Potential of Autophagy Modulation by Natural Products for Cancer Stem Cells
2020
Autophagy, a cellular self-digestion process that is activated in response to stress, has a functional role in tumor formation and progression. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) accounting for a minor proportion of total cancer cells-have distinct self-renewal and differentiation abilities and promote metastasis. Researchers have shown that a numeral number of natural products using traditional experimental methods have been revealed to target CSCs. However, the specific role of autophagy with respect to CSCs and tumorigenesis using natural products are still unknown. Currently, CSCs are considered to be one of the causative reasons underlying the failure of anticancer treatment as a result of tumor…
Role of retinal pigment epithelium-derived exosomes and autophagy in new blood vessel formation
2018
Autophagy and exosome secretion play important roles in a variety of physiological and disease states, including the development of age‐related macular degeneration. Previous studies have demonstrated that these cellular mechanisms share common pathways of activation. Low oxidative damage in ARPE‐19 cells, alters both autophagy and exosome biogenesis. Moreover, oxidative stress modifies the protein and genetic cargo of exosomes, possibly affecting the fate of surrounding cells. In order to understand the connection between these two mechanisms and their impact on angiogenesis, stressed ARPE‐19 cells were treated with a siRNA‐targeting Atg7, a key protein for the formation of autophagosomes.…
Entrapment and characterization of functional allosteric conformers of hemocyanin in sol–gel matrices
2016
Hemocyanins are giant oxygen transport proteins of molluscs and arthropods, which display high cooperativity and a complex pattern of conformations, generated by hierarchical allosteric interactions of their complex quaternary structure. A still unanswered question is the correlation between the functional properties of the postulated conformers and structural features that govern their oxygen binding, such as metal complex coordination. In this study we focus on the dodecameric hemocyanin of the crustacean Carcinus aestuarii, with the aim to obtain a functional and structural characterization of the individual conformational states giving rise to cooperativity, by entrapping hemocyanin int…
Hierarchical architecture of sponge spicules: biocatalytic and structure-directing activity of silicatein proteins as model for bioinspired applicati…
2016
Since the first description of the silicateins, a group of enzymes that mediate the formation of the amorphous, hydrated biosilica of the skeleton of the siliceous sponges, much progress has been achieved in the understanding of this biomineralization process. These discoveries include, beside the proof of the enzymatic nature of the sponge biosilica formation, the dual property of the enzyme, to act both as a structure-forming and structure-guiding protein, and the demonstration that the initial product of silicatein is a soft, gel-like material that has to undergo a maturation process during which it achieves its favorable physical-chemical properties allowing the development of various t…
Decentralised trust-management inspired by ant pheromones
2017
Computational trust is increasingly utilised to select interaction partners in open technical systems consisting of heterogeneous, autonomous agents. Current approaches rely on centralised elements for managing trust ratings (i.e. control and provide access to aggregated ratings). Consider a grid computing application as illustrating example: agents share their computing resources and cooperate in terms of processing computing jobs. These agents are free to join and leave, and they decide on their own with whom to interact. The impact of malicious or uncooperative agents can be countered by only cooperating with agents that have shown to be benevolent: trust relationships are established. T…
Full-automatic computer aided system for stem cell clustering using content-based microscopic image analysis
2017
Abstract Stem cells are very original cells that can differentiate into other cells, tissues and organs, which play a very important role in biomedical treatments. Because of the importance of stem cells, in this paper we propose a full-automatic computer aided clustering system to assist scientists to explore potential co-occurrence relations between the cell differentiation and their morphological information in phenotype. In this proposed system, a multi-stage Content-based Microscopic Image Analysis (CBMIA) framework is applied, including image segmentation, feature extraction, feature selection, feature fusion and clustering techniques. First, an Improved Supervised Normalized Cuts (IS…
SNPs in bone-related miRNAs are associated with the osteoporotic phenotype
2017
AbstractBiogenesis and function of microRNAs can be influenced by genetic variants in the pri-miRNA sequences leading to phenotypic variability. This study aims to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) affecting the expression levels of bone-related mature microRNAs and thus, triggering an osteoporotic phenotype. An association analysis of SNPs located in pri-miRNA sequences with bone mineral density (BMD) was performed in the OSTEOMED2 cohort (n = 2183). Functional studies were performed for assessing the role of BMD-associated miRNAs in bone cells. Two SNPs, rs6430498 in the miR-3679 and rs12512664 in the miR-4274, were significantly associated with femoral neck BMD. Further, we…
FRET-based dynamic structural biology: Challenges, perspectives and an appeal for open-science practices.
2021
International audience; Single-molecule FRET (smFRET) has become a mainstream technique for studying biomolecular structural dynamics. The rapid and wide adoption of smFRET experiments by an ever- increasing number of groups has generated significant progress in sample preparation, measurement procedures, data analysis, algorithms and documentation. Several labs that employ smFRET approaches have joined forces to inform the smFRET community about streamlining how to perform experiments and analyze results for obtaining quantitative information on biomolecular structure and dynamics. The recent efforts include blind tests to assess the accuracy and the precision of smFRET experiments among d…
Astrocytic Ephrin-B1 Controls Synapse Formation in the Hippocampus During Learning and Memory
2020
Astrocytes play a fundamental role in synapse formation, pruning, and plasticity, which are associated with learning and memory. However, the role of astrocytes in learning and memory is still largely unknown. Our previous study showed that astrocyte-specific ephrin-B1 knock-out (KO) enhanced but ephrin-B1 overexpression (OE) in hippocampal astrocytes impaired contextual memory recall following fear conditioning. The goal of this study was to understand the mechanism by which astrocytic ephrin-B1 influences learning; specifically, learning-induced remodeling of synapses and dendritic spines in CA1 hippocampus using fear-conditioning paradigm. While we found a higher dendritic spine density …
Uncoupling of dynamin polymerization and GTPase activity revealed by the conformation-specific nanobody dynab
2017
Dynamin is a large GTPase that forms a helical collar at the neck of endocytic pits, and catalyzes membrane fission (Schmid and Frolov, 2011; Ferguson and De Camilli, 2012). Dynamin fission reaction is strictly dependent on GTP hydrolysis, but how fission is mediated is still debated (Antonny et al., 2016): GTP energy could be spent in membrane constriction required for fission, or in disassembly of the dynamin polymer to trigger fission. To follow dynamin GTP hydrolysis at endocytic pits, we generated a conformation-specific nanobody called dynab, that binds preferentially to the GTP hydrolytic state of dynamin-1. Dynab allowed us to follow the GTPase activity of dynamin-1 in real-time. We…