- Editorial
The heart has long been considered a pumping organ, consisting of muscles [...]
The heart has long been considered a pumping organ, consisting of muscles [...]
Genetic and environmental factors are underlying causes of obesity and other metabolic diseases, so it is therefore difficult to find suitable and effective medical treatments. However, without a doubt, the gut microbiota—and also the bacteria...
The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), still remains a severe threat. At the time of writing this paper, the second infectious wave has caused more than 280,000 deaths all over the world. Italy...
Chronic periodontitis (CP) is a complex pathology with a significant impact worldwide causing bone loss. Oral dysbiosis is a highly inflammatory condition associated to a long-term insulting infection and represents an underestimated CP key factor as...
Background: Periodontal dysbiosis contributes to liver injury through systemic inflammation, oral–gut microbial translocation, and endotoxemia. Lipopolysaccharides (LPSs) and virulence factors derived from periodontal pathogens, particularly Po...
Clinical obstetrics and gynecology increasingly rely on an interdisciplinary synthesis of a wide range of scientific disciplines, including molecular biology, genomics, embryology, environmental health sciences, biochemistry, pathophysiology, endocri...
Despite the advances in molecular biology and biochemistry, the prognosis of patients suffering from tumor diseases remains poor. The limited therapeutic success can be explained by the insufficient performance of the common chemotherapeutic drugs th...
A common belief among pre-medical and medical students is that biochemistry is not relevant to practicing medicine. The problem-based approach of case studies has been used in medical education to scaffold the application of content to clinical cases...
The EPIC consortium brings together experts from a wide range of fields that include clinical, molecular and basic microbiology, infectious diseases, computational biology and chemistry, drug discovery and design, bioinformatics, biochemistry, biophy...
Neuroscience is a vast discipline that deals with the anatomy, biochemistry, molecular biology, physiology and pathophysiology of central and peripheral nerves. Advances made through basic, translational, and clinical research in the field of neurosc...
The tapeworm Hymenolepis diminuta is a common parasite of the small intestine in rodents but it can also infect humans. Due to its characteristics and ease of maintenance in the laboratory, H. diminuta is also an important model species in studies of...
Hemostasis is a physiological process critical for survival. Meanwhile, thrombosis is amongst the leading causes of death worldwide, making antithrombotic therapy one of the most crucial aspects of modern medicine. Although antithrombotic therapy has...
Using transgenic plants for the production of high-value recombinant proteins for industrial and clinical applications has become a promising alternative to using conventional bioproduction systems, such as bacteria, yeast, and cultured insect and an...
Protein ubiquitination belongs to the best characterized pathways of protein degradation in the cell; however, our current knowledge on its physiological consequences is just the tip of an iceberg. The divergence of enzymatic executors of ubiquitinat...
The development of cancer vaccines has been intensively pursued over the past 50 years with modest success. However, recent advancements in the fields of genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and immunology have renewed interest in these immunot...
Nrf2 is a master transcriptional regulator of antioxidant and cytoprotective pathways. Currently in its third decade, research on Nrf2 has expanded to encompass not only basic but also clinical studies. In the present bibliometric review, we employed...
The development of new sequencing technologies in the post-genomic era has accelerated the identification of causative mutations of several single gene disorders. Advances in cell and animal models provide insights into the underlining pathogenesis,...
Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are an important class of therapeutics for the treatment of cancer. Structurally, an ADC comprises an antibody, which serves as the delivery system, a payload drug that is a potent cytotoxin that kills cancer cells, an...
Long regarded as illicit substances with no clinical value, N-dimethylated tryptamines—such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, and bufotenine—have been found to produce naturally in a wide variety of species, inc...
Matrix metalloproteinase-13 (MMP-13) is a member of the Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) family of endopeptidases. MMP-13 is produced in low amounts and is well-regulated during normal physiological conditions. Its expression and secretion are, howev...
Three years after coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), several features of the pathogenesis and innate immune response to SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus disease...
Cyanocobalamin (CNCbl) and aquo/hydroxocobalamin (HOCbl) are the forms of vitamin B12 that are most commonly used for supplementation. They are both converted to methylcobalamin (MeCbl) and 5′-deoxyadenosylcobalamin (AdoCbl), which metabolize h...
The exact link between obesity, vitamin D deficiency, and their relation to cellular senescence in the pathogenesis of subclinical atherosclerosis is still under debate. Therefore, the current study aims to verify the possible role of vitamin D defic...
The wide variety of epigenetic controls available is rapidly expanding the knowledge of molecular biology even overflowing it. At the same time, it can illuminate unsuspected ways of understanding the etiology of cancer. New emerging therapeutic hori...
The STAR family of proteins links signaling pathways to various aspects of post-transcriptional regulation and processing of RNAs. Sam68 belongs to this class of heteronuclear ribonucleoprotein particle K (hnRNP K) homology (KH) single domain-cont...
Elevated levels of vitamin B12 (B12 hypervitaminemia) greater than 1000 pg/mL can be toxic and may serve as a marker for conditions such as cancer, autoimmune inflammatory diseases, or renal or hepatic failure. B12 hypervitaminemia, a complex generat...
This scoping review aims to clarify the interplay between obesity, vitamin D deficiency, cellular senescence, and obesity-related metabolic consequences, mainly subclinical atherosclerosis, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Obesity is a...
Protein kinase CK2 is a crucial regulator of endothelial cell proliferation, migration and sprouting during angiogenesis. However, it is still unknown whether this kinase additionally affects the angiogenic activity of other vessel-associated cells....
Since diabetes is a global epidemic, the development of novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of this disease is of major clinical interest. Diabetes is differentiated in two types: type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) and type 2 diabetes mellitu...
Mono(ADP-ribosyl)ation (MARylation) is a regulatory post-translational modification of proteins that controls their functions through a variety of mechanisms. MARylation is catalyzed by mono(ADP-ribosyl) transferase (MART) enzymes, a subclass of the...
The intestinal mucosal barrier, also referred to as intestinal barrier, is widely recognized as a critical player in gut homeostasis maintenance as it ensures the complex crosstalk between gut microbes (both commensals and pathogens) and the host imm...
The human gastrointestinal tract contains the largest population of immune cells in the body and this is a reflection of the fact that it is continuously exposed to a myriad of dietary and bacterial antigens. Although these cells produce a variety of...
RNA modifications are essential for proper RNA processing, quality control, and maturation steps. In the last decade, some eukaryotic DNA repair enzymes have been shown to have an ability to recognize and process modified RNA substrates and thereby c...
The human zinc finger protein 521 (ZNF521) is a co-transcriptional factor with multiple recognized regulatory functions in a range of normal, cancer and stem cell compartments. ZNF521 regulates proliferation, progression and CSC (cancer stem cell) co...
Type 1 diabetes (T1D) mellitus is a chronic illness in children and teens, with rising global incidence rates. It stems from an autoimmune attack on pancreatic β cells, leading to insufficient insulin production. Genetic susceptibility and envir...
Higher prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases is strictly connected with progressive aging of the world population. Interestingly, a broad range of age-related, neurodegenerative diseases is characterized by a common pathological mechanism—ac...
A comprehensive understanding of the molecular basis and mechanisms underlying cardiac diseases is mandatory for the development of new and effective therapeutic strategies. The lack of appropriate in vitro cell models that faithfully mirror the huma...
Fibromyalgia (FM) is a common chronic pain syndrome that affects 1% to 5% of the population. We aimed to investigate the role of endothelial dysfunction and autophagy in fibromyalgia-related vascular and cerebral cortical changes in a reserpine-induc...
Mitochondria are the organelles deputed to energy production, but they are also involved in carcinogenesis, cancer progression, and metastasis, playing a role in altered energy metabolism in cancer cells. Mitochondrial metabolism is connected with se...
In pancreatic β-cells of the line INS-1, glucose uptake and metabolism induce the openings of Ca2+-permeable TRPM3 channels that contribute to the elevation of the intracellular Ca2+ concentration and the fusion of insulin granules with the plas...
A low total plasma vitamin B12 supports a clinical suspicion of B12 deficiency, while the interpretation of an unexpectedly normal/high level is marred by controversies. Here, we critically review current knowledge on B12 in blood plasma, including t...
The pyrazolopyrimidine based compound SGC-CK2-1 is a potent and highly specific CK2 inhibitor and a new tool to study the biological functions of protein kinase CK2 irrespective from off-target effects. We used this compound in comparison with the we...
Tumors of the digestive system, when combined together, account for more new cases and deaths per year than tumors arising in any other system of the body and their incidence continues to increase. Despite major efforts aimed at discovering and valid...
Aberrant glycosylation has long been known to be associated with cancer, since it is involved in key mechanisms such as tumour onset, development and progression. This review will focus on protein glycosylation studies in cells, tissue, urine and ser...
Background: Multiple myeloma bone disease (MMBD) constitutes a common and severe complication of multiple myeloma (MM), impacting the quality of life and survival. We evaluated the clinical value of a panel of 19 miRNAs associated with osteoporosis i...
Multiple myeloma (MM) is the second most common hematological malignancy, arising from terminally differentiated B cells, namely plasma cells. miRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that participate in the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression...
Immunotherapy using checkpoint inhibitors targeting the interaction between PD-1 on T cells and PD-L1 on cancer cells has shown significant results in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Not all patients respond to the therapy, and PD-L1 expression h...
Mammalian cells can obtain energy by taking up different macromolecules, depending on their availability in the external environment [...]
Erythroid differentiation is a complex and multistep process during which an adequate supply of iron for hemoglobinization is required. The role of ferritin heavy subunit, in this process, has been mainly attributed to its capacity to maintain iron i...
Transglutaminase 2 (TG2) is a critical cancer cell survival factor that activates several signalling pathways to foster drug resistance, cancer stem cell survival, metastasis, inflammation, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, and angiogenesis. All-tra...
of 32