DNA vaccines have inherent advantages compared to other vaccine types, including safety, rapid design and construction, ease and speed to manufacture, and thermostability. However, a major drawback of candidate DNA vaccines delivered by needle and sy...
The structure-activity relationship of mono-ion complexes (MICs) for plasmid DNA (pDNA) delivery by muscular injection is demonstrated. MICs were formed between pDNA and monocationic poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) macromolecules. As monocationic PEGs, t...
Mitochondrial gene therapy and diagnosis have the potential to provide substantial medical benefits. However, the utility of this approach has not yet been realized because the technology available for mitochondrial gene delivery continues to be a bo...
Background/Objectives: A key disadvantage of DNA vaccines is ineffective uptake of plasmid DNA, resulting in low immunogenicity. A way to overcome it is forced DNA delivery, which requires specialized equipment and/or reagents. Effective delivery of...
Antibiotic resistance poses a growing risk to public health, requiring new tools to combat pathogenic bacteria. Contractile injection systems, including bacteriophage tails, pyocins, and bacterial type VI secretion systems, can efficiently penetrate...
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5 clade 2.3.4.4b viruses are widespread in wild and domestic birds, causing severe economic damage to the global poultry industry. Moreover, viruses of this clade are known to cause infections in mammals, pos...
Retinal eye diseases are the leading cause of blindness in the Western world. Up to date, the only efficient treatment for many retinal diseases consists of invasive intravitreal injections of highly concentrated drugs. Despite the fact that these in...
Background/Objectives: To design the pDNA delivery carrier for delivery into skeletal muscle, a total of twelve terminal-alkylated PEGs (Cx-I-PEGy) with four alkyl groups of different carbon numbers (Cx: x = 4, 8, 12, 16) modified via an imine spacer...
Short-term expression of transgenes is one of the problems frequently associated with non-viral in vivo gene transfer. To obtain experimental evidence for the design of sustainable transgene expression systems, the contribution of epigenetic modifica...
The development of a safe and effective vaccine against avian influenza A virus (AIV) H5N8 is relevant due to the widespread distribution of this virus in the bird population and the existing potential risk of human infection, which can lead to signi...
Sperm DNA fragmentation (SDF) levels have been measured in the workup for in vitro fertilization (IVF) at PIVET since 2007, with the Halosperm test having replaced the previous sperm chromatin structure assay (SCSA) since 2013. Of 2624 semen samples...
Regulated drug delivery is an important direction in the field of medicine and healthcare research. In recent years, injectable hydrogels with good biocompatibility and biodegradability have attracted extensive attention due to their promising applic...
Grapevine leafroll disease (GLRD) is the most globally prevalent and destructive disease complex responsible for significant reductions in grape yield and quality as well as wine production. GLRD is associated with several positive-strand RNA viruses...
Sperm DNA fragmentation (SDF) is increasingly regarded as a biomarker of male infertility, but its predictive value for intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) outcomes remains controversial. This retrospective cohort study analyzed 870 fresh single-...
Background: Sperm DNA fragmentation (SDF) is increasingly recognized as a clinically relevant marker of male reproductive potential and has been associated with impaired embryo development, miscarriage, and suboptimal assisted reproductive technology...
Since the birth of Louise Brown in 1978 via IVF, reproductive specialists have acquired enormous knowledge and refined several procedures, which are nowadays applied in assisted reproductive technology (ART). One of the most critical steps in this pr...
People who inject drugs (PWID) are a population exposed to many genotoxicants and with a high prevalence of HCV infection. Direct-acting antiviral (DAA) regimens are now widely used to treat chronic HCV infection. Although side effects to treatment a...
Utilizing the immune system as a strategy for disease prevention and treatment is promising, especially with dendritic cells (DCs) playing a central role in adaptive immune responses. The unique properties of DCs drive interest in developing material...
This study aimed to compare sperm DNA fragmentation (SDF) levels between ejaculate and testicular sperm and evaluate clinical outcomes of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) cycles using testicular sperm (T-ICSI) versus ejaculate sperm (E-ICSI) i...
Osteoporosis is commonly treated via the long-term usage of anti-osteoporotic agents; however, poor drug compliance and undesirable side effects limit their treatment efficacy. The parathyroid hormone-related protein (PTHrP) is essential for normal b...
Cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) and cryo-electron tomography (Cryo-ET) provide structural insights into complex biological processes. The podoviridae are dsDNA containing phage with short, non-contractile tails which nevertheless translocate their...
In the present work, we provide evidence for visible light irradiation of the Au/TiO2 nanoparticles’ surface plasmon resonance band (SPR) leading to electron injection from the Au nanoparticles to the conduction band of TiO2. The Au/TiO2 SPR ba...
This retrospective cohort study was conducted on 1148 males who presented along with their partners for infertility management at the PIVET Medical Centre between 2013 and 2022 and had a sperm DNA fragmentation (SDF) assay performed by Halosperm, the...
The development of CRISPR-associated proteins, such as Cas9, has led to increased accessibility and ease of use in genome editing. However, additional tools are needed to quantify and identify successful genome editing events in living animals. We de...
The evaluation of morpho-functional sperm characteristics alone is not enough to explain infertility or to predict the outcome of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART): more sensitive diagnostic tools are needed in clinical practice. The aim of th...
Tailed double-stranded DNA bacteriophages inject some proteins with their dsDNA during infection. Phage P22 injects about 12, 12, and 30 molecules of the proteins encoded by genes 7, 16 and 20, respectively. After their ejection from the virion, they...
The nuclear transfer process is one of the critical rate-limiting processes in transgene expression. In the present study, we report on the effect of compaction and the size of the DNA molecule on nuclear transfer efficiency by microinjection. A DNA/...
The interactions of DNA with lysozyme in the surface layer were studied by performing infrared reflection–absorption spectroscopy (IRRAS), ellipsometry, surface tensiometry, surface dilational rheology, and atomic force microscopy (AFM). A conc...
Despite extensive research, there is still no vaccine against the hepatitis C virus (HCV). The aim of this study was to investigate whether MSCs can exhibit adjuvant properties during DNA vaccination against hepatitis C. We used the pcNS3-NS5B plasmi...
Current worldwide mRNA vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 by intramuscular injection using a needled syringe has greatly protected numerous people from COVID-19. An intramuscular injection is generally well tolerated, safer and easier to perform on a lar...
The combination of mosaic Gag and CAP256 envelope in an HIV vaccine regimen comprising DNA prime and modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) boost followed by protein boost has previously been shown to generate robust autologous Tier 2 neutralizing antibodies...
With the rapid progress of genetic engineering and gene therapy, the World Anti-Doping Agency has been alerted to gene doping and prohibited its use in sports. However, there is no standard method available yet for the detection of transgenes deliver...
The system designed in this study involves a three-dimensional (3D) microelectronic mechanical system chip structure using DNA printing technology. We employed diverse diameters and cavity thickness for the heater. DNA beads were placed in this rapid...
In our previous studies, OptiPrep and Percoll density gradients separated human motile sperm without DNA fragmentation from immotile sperm with DNA damage. Even in normospermia, over half of the sperm were already immotile, and angle-modulated two-di...
Vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 and other viral infections requires safe, effective, and inexpensive vaccines that can be rapidly developed. DNA vaccines are candidates that meet these criteria, but one of their drawbacks is their relatively weak immu...
Background/Objectives: Antigen presenting cells (APCs) and immune cells have unique properties to drive or suppress immune responses. They are therefore key targets for the expression of vaccine antigens or transgene proteins. To better determine the...
In veterinary medicine, there have been different experiences with the plasmid DNA vaccination. In this area and with the hypothesis to demonstrate the effectiveness of different plasmids encoding porcine respiratory and reproductive syndrome (PRRS),...
Antiviral nucleoside analogues (ANA) are newly used therapeutics acting against the hepatitis C virus (HCV). This class of drug is well known to exhibit toxicity on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). People who inject drugs (PWID) are particularly affected b...
Natterin is a potent pro-inflammatory fish molecule, inducing local and systemic IL-1β/IL-1R1-dependent neutrophilia mediated by non-canonical NLRP6 and NLRC4 inflammasome activation in mice, independent of NLRP3. In this work, we investigated w...
The transmission of the ts-11 strain of Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG) vaccine (ts-11MGV) between incubated eggs and between hatchlings that was administrated via in ovo injection, and its subsequent effects on their posthatch performance were evaluat...
Generation of transgenic organisms by pronuclear microinjection has become a routine procedure. However, while the process of DNA integration in the genome is well understood, we still do not know much about the recombination between transgene molecu...
CRISPR-Cas9-based genome-editing is a highly efficient and cost-effective method to generate zebrafish loss-of-function alleles. However, introducing patient-specific variants into the zebrafish genome with CRISPR-Cas9 remains challenging. Targeting...
Recent high-resolution (≈500 bp) Hi-C experiments reported contact maps with unusual patterns around highly expressed bacterial DNA loci. These patterns, described as “arched stripes” and “bundled domains”, extend over n...
Although bacteria-free DNA in blood during systemic infection is mainly derived from bacterial death, translocation of the DNA from the gut into the blood circulation (gut translocation) is also possible. Hence, several mouse models with experiments...
Studies on molecular mechanisms of the persist infection of hepatitis B virus have been hampered by a lack of a robust animal model. We successfully established a simple, versatile, and reproducible HBV persist infection model in vitro and in vivo...
Background: We have recently introduced an intelligent RNA expression device (iRed), comprising the minimum essential components needed to transcribe short hairpin RNA (shRNA) in cells. Use of iRed efficiently produced shRNA molecules after transfect...
Most advanced vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV)-2 are designed to induce antibodies against spike (S) protein. Differently, we developed an original strategy to induce CD8+ T cytotoxic lymphocyte (CTL) immunity...
Antheraea pernyi is an important lepidopteran used as a model insect species to investigate immune responses, development, and metabolism modulation. DNA methylation has recently been found to control various physiological processes throughout the li...
CpG-DNA activates the host immune system to resist bacterial infections. In this study, we examined the protective effect of CpG-DNA in mice against Escherichia coli (E. coli) K1 infection. Administration of CpG-DNA increased the survival of mice aft...
In recent years, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have emerged as a revolutionary technology for vaccine delivery. LNPs serve as an integral component of mRNA vaccines by protecting and transporting the mRNA payload into host cells. Despite their prominenc...
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