International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Volume 22, Issue 10

Increasing evidence links metabolic disorders with neurodegenerative processes including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Late AD is associated with amyloid (Aβ) plaque accumulation, neuroinflammation, and central insulin resistance. Here, a humanized AD mo...

The scientific interest in the beneficial properties of natural substances has been recognized for decades, as well as the growing attention in extracellular vesicles (EVs) released by different organisms, in particular from animal cells. However, th...

Schwann cells are normally quiescent, myelinating glia cells of the peripheral nervous system. Their aberrant proliferation and transformation underlie the development of benign tumors (neurofibromas) as well as deadly malignant peripheral nerve shea...

Previous studies have shown that COVID-19 leads to thrombotic complications, which have been associated with high morbidity and mortality rates. Neutrophils are the largest population of white blood cells and play a pivotal role in innate immunity. D...

Developments in mass spectrometry (MS)-based analyses of glycoproteins have been important to study changes in glycosylation related to disease. Recently, the characteristic pattern of oxonium ions in glycopeptide fragmentation spectra had been used...

Tau protein is largely responsible for tauopathies, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), where it accumulates in the brain as insoluble aggregates. Tau mRNA is regulated by alternative splicing, and inclusion or exclusion of exon 10 gives rise to the...

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) found locus 3p21.31 associated with severe COVID-19. CCR5 resides at the same locus and, given its known biological role in other infection diseases, we investigated if common noncoding and rare coding variants,...

The hard tick Ixodes ricinus is a vector of Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis. Host blood protein digestion, essential for tick development and reproduction, occurs in tick midgut digestive cells driven by cathepsin proteases. Little is known...

Little is known about DNA tandem repeats across prokaryotes. We have recently described an enigmatic group of tandem repeats in bacterial genomes with a constant repeat size but variable sequence. These findings strongly suggest that tandem repeat si...

Lysophosphatidic acid (LPA), a bioactive lipid produced extracellularly by autotaxin (ATX), has been known to induce various pathophysiological events, including cancer cell invasion and metastasis. Discoidin domain receptor 2 (DDR2) expression is up...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common chronic liver disease and represents the hepatic expression of several metabolic abnormalities of high epidemiologic relevance. Fat accumulation in the hepatocytes results in cellular fragil...

Organophosphate flame retardants (OPFRs) are substances added to plastics, textiles, and furniture, and are used as alternatives to brominated flame retardants. As the use of OPFRs increases in the manufacturing industry, the concentration in the aqu...

The P53 pathway is the most important cellular pathway to maintain genomic and cellular integrity, both in embryonic and non-embryonic cells. Stress signals induce its activation, initiating autophagy or cell cycle arrest to enable DNA repair. The pe...

Glioblastoma (GBM) cells feature mitochondrial alterations, which are documented and quantified in the present study, by using ultrastructural morphometry. Mitochondrial impairment, which roughly occurs in half of the organelles, is shown to be relat...

Regeneration of damaged tissues or organs is one of the significant challenges in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Many researchers have fabricated various scaffolds to accelerate the tissue regeneration process. However, most of the sca...

The work outlines general ideas on how the frequency and the intensity of proton vibrations of X–H···Y hydrogen bonding are formed as the bond evolves from weak to maximally strong bonding. For this purpose, the Raman spectra of different chemical co...

In retinitis pigmentosa (RP), one of many possible genetic mutations causes rod degeneration, followed by cone secondary death leading to blindness. Accumulating evidence indicates that rod death triggers multiple, non-cell-autonomous processes, whic...

(1) Background: methionine cycle is not only essential for cancer cell proliferation but is also critical for metabolic reprogramming, a cancer hallmark. Hepatic and extrahepatic tissues methionine adenosyltransferases (MATs) are products of two gene...

Programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1)/programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) immune checkpoint has long been implicated in modeling antitumor immunity; PD-1/PD-L1 axis inhibitors exert their antitumor effects by relieving PD-L1-mediated suppression on tu...

Lung carcinoma is still the most common malignancy worldwide. One of the major subtypes of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is adenocarcinoma (AC). As driver mutations and hence therapies differ in AC subtypes, we theorized that the expression and...

Rheumatic diseases constitute a diversified group of diseases distinguished by arthritis and often involve other organs. The affected individual has low quality of life, productivity even life-threatening in some severe conditions. Moreover, they imp...

Dendritic cells (DCs) are unique immune cells that can link innate and adaptive immune responses and Immunometabolism greatly impacts their phenotype. Rapamycin is a macrolide compound that has immunosuppressant functions and is used to prevent graft...

Identification of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) and precursor lesions in histological tissue slides can be challenging and elaborate, especially due to tumor heterogeneity. Thus, supportive tools for the identification of anatomical and pat...

High saturated fat diets have been associated with the development of obesity and hypertension, along with other pathologies related to the metabolic syndrome. In contrast, the Mediterranean diet, characterized by its high content of monounsaturated...

Obesity-induced adipose tissue dysfunction and disorders of glycolipid metabolism have become a worldwide research priority. Zfp217 plays a crucial role in adipogenesis of 3T3-L1 preadipocytes, but about its functions in animal models are not yet cle...

(1) Background: Blue light is important for the formation of maize stomata, but the signal network remains unclear. (2) Methods: We replaced red light with blue light in an experiment and provided a complementary regulatory network for the stomatal d...

The most critical group of all includes multidrug resistant bacteria that pose a particular threat in hospitals, as they can cause severe and often deadly infections. Modern medicine still faces the difficult task of developing new agents for the eff...

Mutations in POC1B are a rare cause of inherited retinal degeneration. In this study, we present a thorough phenotypic and genotypic characterization of three individuals harboring putatively pathogenic variants in the POC1B gene. All patients displa...

Small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO)-targeted E3 ubiquitin ligases (STUbLs) are specialized enzymes that recognize SUMOylated proteins and attach ubiquitin to them. They therefore connect the cellular SUMOylation and ubiquitination circuits. STUbLs p...

Multisubunit cullin-RING ubiquitin ligase 4 (CRL4)-DCAF12 recognizes the C-terminal degron containing acidic amino acid residues. However, its physiological roles and substrates are largely unknown. Purification of CRL4-DCAF12 complexes revealed a wi...

α-Synuclein (α-syn) is a hallmark amyloidogenic protein component of Lewy bodies in dopaminergic neurons affected by Parkinson’s disease (PD). Despite the multi-faceted gene regulation of α-syn in the nucleus, the mechanism underlying α-syn crosstalk...

Music is an exclusive feature of humankind. It can be considered as a form of universal communication, only partly comparable to the vocalizations of songbirds. Many trends of research in this field try to address music origins, as well as the geneti...

Depression is a highly prevalent, disabling, and often chronic illness that places substantial burdens on patients, families, healthcare systems, and the economy. A substantial minority of patients are unresponsive to current therapies, so there is a...

Central and peripheral serotonin (5HT) have opposing functions in the regulation of energy homeostasis. Both increasing 5HT signaling in the brain and decreasing 5HT signaling in the periphery have been proposed as potential treatments for obesity. T...

Interest in graphene oxide nature and potential applications (especially nanocarriers) has resulted in numerous studies, but the results do not lead to clear conclusions. In this paper, graphene oxide is obtained by multiple synthesis methods and gen...

Advances in virology and skin cancer over recent decades have produced achievements that have been recognized not only in the field of dermatology, but also in other areas of medicine. They have modified the therapeutic and preventive solutions that...

Angiogenesis is one of the main processes that coordinate the biological events leading to a successful pregnancy, and its imbalance characterizes several pregnancy-related diseases, including preeclampsia. Intracellular interactions via extracellula...

Progestogens are frequently administered during early pregnancy to patients undergoing assisted reproductive techniques (ART) to overcome progesterone deficits following ART procedures. Orally administered dydrogesterone (DG) shows equal efficacy to...

Bone transplantation is regarded as the preferred therapy to treat a variety of bone defects. Autologous bone tissue is often lacking at the source, and the mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) responsible for bone repair mechanisms are extracted by invasiv...

Curcumin is a natural bioactive component derived from the turmeric plant Curcuma longa, which exhibits a range of beneficial activities on human cells. Previously, an inhibitory effect of curcumin on platelets was demonstrated. However, it is unknow...

Resistance to anticancer therapeutics occurs in virtually every type of cancer and becomes a major difficulty in cancer treatment. Although 5-fluorouracil (5FU) is the first-line choice of anticancer therapy for gastric cancer, its effectiveness is l...

Tricopeptide repeats are common in natural proteins, and are exemplified by 34- and 35-residue repeats, known respectively as tetratricopeptide repeats (TPRs) and pentatricopeptide repeats (PPRs). In both classes, each repeat unit forms an antiparall...

We have performed 280 $\mathsf{\mu }$s of unbiased molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate the effects of 12 different cancer mutations on Kelch-like ECH-associated protein 1 (KEAP1) (G333C, G350S, G364C, G379D, R413L, R415G, A427V, G430C, R470C, R470H,...

Abnormal patterns of cerebral perfusion/oxygenation are associated with neuronal damage. In preterm neonates, hypoxemia, hypo-/hypercapnia and lack of cerebral autoregulation are related to peri-intraventricular hemorrhages and white matter injury. R...

Ulcerative colitis (UC), a severe chronic disease with unclear etiology that is associated with increased risk for colorectal cancer, is accompanied by dysregulation of cytokines. Epstein–Barr virus-induced gene 3 (EBI3) encodes a subunit in the uniq...

Despite liver cancer being the second-leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide, few systemic drugs have been approved. Sorafenib, the first FDA-approved systemic drug for unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), is limited by resistance. H...

Drought stress is a major constraint in global maize production, causing almost 30–90% of the yield loss depending upon growth stage and the degree and duration of the stress. Here, we report that ectopic expression of Arabidopsis glutaredoxin S17 (A...

The total damage inflicted on the liver before transplantation is associated with several surgical manipulations, such as organ recovery, washout of the graft, cold conservation in organ preservation solutions (UW, Celsior, HTK, IGL-1), and rinsing o...

Selenium-binding protein 1 (Selenbp1) is a 2,3,7,8-tetrechlorodibenzo-p-dioxin inducible protein whose function is yet to be comprehensively elucidated. As the highly homologous isoform, Selenbp2, is expressed at low levels in the kidney, it is worth...

Endometrosis is a reproductive pathology that is responsible for mare infertility. Our recent studies have focused on the involvement of neutrophil extracellular traps enzymes, such as elastase (ELA), in the development of equine endometrosis. Noscap...