2021 February - 287 articles
The defense organization of our organism is found in the immune system, which has two important components, the innate and the adaptive immunity, where different molecules, cells, and organs are involved and coordinated to protect us from external an...
Eradication of latent human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is a global health challenge. Reactivation of HIV latency and killing of virus-infected cells, the so-called “kick and kill” or “shock and kill” approaches, are a popular strategy for...
Humanized mouse models have contributed significantly to human immunology research. In transplant immunity, human immune cell responses to donor grafts have not been reproduced in a humanized animal model. To elicit human T-cell immune responses, we...
Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a severe cardiovascular disease that is caused by the progressive occlusion of the distal pulmonary arteries, eventually leading to right heart failure and death. Almost 40% of patients with PAH are iron defic...
The Hippo pathway regulates a complex signalling network which mediates several biological functions including cell proliferation, organ size and apoptosis. Several scaffold proteins regulate the crosstalk of the members of the pathway with other sig...
Malaria is a parasitic disease (caused by different Plasmodium species) that affects millions of people worldwide. The lack of effective malaria drugs and a vaccine contributes to this disease, continuing to cause major public health and socioeconomi...
Mutations in the leucine-rich repeat kinase-2 (LRRK2) gene cause autosomal-dominant Parkinson’s disease (PD) and contribute to sporadic PD. Common genetic variation in LRRK2 modifies susceptibility to immunological disorders including Crohn’s disease...
Current gold-standard strategies for bone regeneration do not achieve the optimal recovery of bone biomechanical properties. To bypass these limitations, tissue engineering techniques based on hybrid materials made up of osteoprogenitor cells—such as...
In the original review [...]
The fertilised chick egg and particularly its chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) have drawn continuing interest in biomedicine and bioengineering fields, especially for research on vascular study, cancer, drug screening and development, cell factors, ste...
The cyclic AMP (cAMP) signalling cascade is necessary for cell homeostasis and plays important roles in many processes. This is particularly relevant during ageing and age-related diseases, where drastic changes, generally decreases, in cAMP levels h...
Chromosome segregation—the partitioning of genetic material into two daughter cells—is one of the most crucial processes in cell division. In all Eukaryotes, chromosome segregation is driven by the spindle, a microtubule-based, self-organizing subcel...
Dietary supplementation is a widely adapted strategy to maintain nutritional balance for improving health and preventing chronic diseases. Conflicting results in studies of similar design, however, suggest that there is substantial heterogenicity in...
Adipose tissue is an abundant source of stem cells. However, liposuction cannot yield cell quantities sufficient for direct applications in regenerative medicine. Therefore, the development of GMP-compliant ex vivo expansion protocols is required to...
In Arabidopsis thaliana there are more than 600 C-to-U RNA editing events in the mitochondria and at least 44 in the chloroplasts. Pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins provide the specificity for these reactions. They recognize RNA sequences in a...
Cell migration is a fundamental biological process of key importance in health and disease. Advances in imaging techniques have paved the way to monitor cell motility. An ever-growing collection of computational tools to track cells has improved our...
Flight dispersal represents a key aspect of the evolutionary and ecological success of insects, allowing escape from predators, mating, and colonization of new niches. The huge energy demand posed by flight activity is essentially met by oxidative ph...
We investigated the role of aldosterone (ALDO) in the development of arterial thrombosis in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. To evaluate the effect of endogenous ALDO, the rats underwent adrenalectomy (ADX). ADX reduced the development of arteri...
Lipid Droplets (LD) are dynamic organelles that originate in the Endoplasmic Reticulum and mostly bud off toward the cytoplasm, where they store neutral lipids for energy and protection purposes. LD also have diverse proteins on their surface, many o...
In contrast to the traditional view of mitochondria being solely a source of cellular energy, e.g., the “powerhouse” of the cell, mitochondria are now known to be key regulators of numerous cellular processes. Accordingly, disturbance of mitochondria...
Heart failure (HF) represents the end-stage condition of several structural and functional cardiovascular diseases, characterized by reduced myocardial pump function and increased pressure load. The dysregulation of neurohormonal systems, especially...
Multidrug resistance (MDR) is one of the major clinical challenges in cancer treatment and compromises the effectiveness of conventional anticancer chemotherapeutics. Among known mechanisms of drug resistance, drug efflux via ATP binding cassette (AB...
Female infertility is mainly caused by ovulation disorders, which affect female reproduction and pregnancy worldwide, with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) being the most prevalent of these. PCOS is a frequent endocrine disease that is associated wit...
Sirtuins (SIRTs) are nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide-dependent histone deacetylases that incorporate complex functions in the mechanisms of cell physiology. Mammals have seven distinct members of the SIRT family (SIRT1-7), which play an important r...
Epigenetic regulation and modification govern the transcriptional mechanisms that promote disease initiation and progression, but can also control the oncogenic processes, cell signaling networks, immunogenicity, and immune cells involved in anti-inf...
The prognosis for newly diagnosed subjects with multiple myeloma (MM) has significantly progressed in recent years. However, most MM patients relapse and after several salvage therapies, the onset of multidrug resistance provokes the occurrence of a...
(1) Background: This study was aimed at identifying the Colletotrichum species associated with twig and shoot dieback of citrus, a new syndrome occurring in the Mediterranean region and also reported as emerging in California. (2) Methods: Overall, 1...
Palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) is an endogenous anti-inflammatory lipid mediator and a widely used nutraceutical. In this study, we designed, realized, and tested a drug-carrier conjugate between PEA (the active drug) and glucuronic acid (the carrier)....
Choline and choline metabolites are essential for all cellular functions. They have also been reported to be crucial for neural development. In this work, we studied the functional characteristics of the choline uptake system in human neural stem cel...
Cytochrome-c-oxidase (COX) subunit 4 (COX4) plays important roles in the function, assembly and regulation of COX (mitochondrial respiratory complex 4), the terminal electron acceptor of the oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) system. The principal CO...
One of the most fundamental processes of the cell is the uptake of molecules from the surrounding environment. Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) is the best-described uptake pathway and regulates nutrient uptake, protein and lipid turnover at the p...
Surgery remains an essential therapeutic approach for most solid malignancies. Although for more than a century accumulating clinical and experimental data have indicated that surgical procedures themselves may promote the appearance and progression...
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) that is triggered by metabolic defects is one of the most malignant liver cancers. A much higher incidence of HCC among men than women suggests the protective roles of estrogen in HCC development and progression. To beg...
(1) Background: It is known that sickle cells contain a higher amount of Ca2+ compared to healthy red blood cells (RBCs). The increased Ca2+ is associated with the most severe symptom of sickle cell disease (SCD), the vaso-occlusive crisis (VOC). The...
Chronic stimulation by infectious pathogens or self-antigen glucosylsphingosine (GlcSph) can lead to monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) and multiple myeloma (MM). Novel assays such as the multiplex infectious antigen microarray...
Multiple myeloma (MM) remains an incurable tumor due to the high rate of relapse that still occurs. Acquired drug resistance represents the most challenging obstacle to the extension of survival and several studies have been conducted to understand t...
The effect of switching from originator infliximab to biosimilar infliximab in patients with sarcoidosis is unknown. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of switching from Remicade® or Inflectra® to Flixabi® in patients with sever...
Although the importance of inflammation in atherosclerosis is now well established, the exact molecular processes linking inflammation to the development and course of the disease are not sufficiently understood. In this context, modern genetics—as a...
Pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE) is an autosomal recessive disorder caused by mutations in the ATP-binding cassette sub-family C member 6 gene. Our previous studies revealed that PXE might be associated with premature aging. Treatment with statins show...
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the greatest health problems affecting people worldwide. Atherosclerosis, in turn, is one of the most common causes of cardiovascular disease. Due to the high mortality rate from cardiovascular diseases, prevent...
Background: Mast cells (MCs) contain proangiogenic factors, in particular tryptase, associated with increased angiogenesis in several tumours. With special reference to pancreatic cancer, few data have been published on the role of MCs in angiogenesi...
Zebrafish has proven to be a versatile and reliable experimental in vivo tool to study human hematopoiesis and model hematological malignancies. Transgenic technologies enable the generation of specific leukemia types by the expression of human oncog...
Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory condition of the arterial wall that leads to the formation of vessel-occluding plaques within the subintimal space of middle-sized and larger arteries. While traditionally understood as a myeloid-driven lipid...
Macrophages are professional antigen presenting cells with intense phagocytic activity, strategically distributed in tissues and cavities. These cells are capable of responding to a wide variety of innate inflammatory stimuli, many of which are signa...
Ionising radiation-induced normal tissue damage is a major concern in clinic and public health. It is the most limiting factor in radiotherapy treatment of malignant diseases. It can also cause a serious harm to populations exposed to accidental radi...
Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most frequent primary malignant tumor of bone in humans and animals. Comparative oncology is a field of study that examines the cancer risk and tumor progression across the species. The canine model is ideally suited for tran...
The scanning of surrounding tissues by T lymphocytes to detect cognate antigens requires high speed, sensitivity and specificity. T-cell receptor (TCR) co-receptors such as CD8 increase detection performance, but the exact mechanism remains incomplet...
Bone metastases frequently occur in breast cancer patients and lack appropriate treatment options. Hence, understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in the multistep process of breast cancer bone metastasis and tumor-induced osteolysis is of par...
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a leading cause of cancer-related death and the search for a resolutive therapy is still a challenge. Since KRAS is commonly mutated in PDAC and is one of the main drivers of PDAC progression, its inhibition...
Several methods for the stimulation of skin wound repair have been proposed over the last few decades. The most promising among them are gene and stem cell therapy. Our present experiments combined several approaches via the application of human umbi...
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