(HealthDay News) — Heart damage caused by heavy cocaine use can occur without producing any symptoms, according to a new study. Researchers assessed the heart health of 30 long-term cocaine users, average age 37, who entered a drug rehabilitation program 48 hours after they last used cocaine. They had been using cocaine for an average [...]
Background: Hemicellulose is often credited with being one of the important physical barriers to enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose by blocking enzyme access to the cellulose surface. In addition to that, our recent research suggested that hemicelluloses, particularly in the form of xylan and its oligomers, can more strongly inhibit cellulase activity than glucose and cellobiose. [...]
Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is a multi-system disease caused by mutations in the NF1 gene encoding a Ras-GAP protein, neurofibromin, which negatively regulates Ras signaling. Besides neuroectodermal malformations and tumors, the skeletal system is often affected (e.g. scoliosis and long bone dysplasia) demonstrating the importance of neurofibromin for development and maintenance of the musculoskeletal system. [...]
Epigenetic regulation is essential in determining cellular phenotypes during differentiation. Although tissue-specific DNA methylation has been studied, the significance of methylation variance for tissue phenotypes remains unresolved, especially for CpG-poor promoters. Here, we comprehensively studied methylation levels of 27 578 CpG sites among 21 human normal tissues from 12 anatomically different regions using an epigenotyping [...]
Hepatocytes that have differentiated from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have great potential for the treatment of liver disease as well as for drug testing. Moreover, in vitro hepatogenesis is a powerful model system for studying the molecular mechanisms underlying liver development. DNA methylation is an important epigenetic mechanism that influences differential gene expression during [...]
Mutations of SQSTM1 occur in about10% of patients with Paget’s disease of bone (PDB), but it is unclear whether they play a causal role or regulate susceptibility to an environmental trigger. Here we show that mice with a proline to leucine mutation at codon 394 of mouse sqstm1 (P394L), equivalent to the P392L SQSTM1 mutation [...]
Cystic fibrosis (CF), a multisystem disease caused by CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator) gene mutations, is associated with an abnormal inflammatory response and compromised redox homeostasis in the airways. Recent evidence suggests that dysfunctional CFTR leads to redox imbalance and to mitochondrial reduced glutathione (mtGSH) depletion in CF models. This study was designed to [...]
Arylsulfatase A (ASA) catalyzes the desulfation of sulfatide, a major lipid component of myelin. Inherited functional deficiencies of ASA cause the lysosomal storage disease (LSD) metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD), which is characterized by intralysosomal accumulation of sulfatide, progressive neurological symptoms and early death. Enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) using intravenous injection of active enzyme is a treatment [...]
Recent studies have implicated an N-terminal caspase-6 cleavage product of mutant huntingtin (htt) as an important mediator of toxicity in Huntington’s disease (HD). To directly assess the consequences of such fragments on neurologic function, we produced transgenic mice that express a caspase-6 length N-terminal fragment of mutant htt (N586) with both normal (23Q) and disease [...]
Recent evidence supports a role for RNA as a common pathogenic agent in both the ‘polyglutamine’ and ‘untranslated’ dominant expanded repeat disorders. One feature of all repeat sequences currently associated with disease is their predicted ability to form a hairpin secondary structure at the RNA level. In order to investigate mechanisms by which hairpin-forming repeat [...]
Huntington’s disease (HD) is caused by the expansion mutation above a length threshold of a polyglutamine (polyQ) stretch in the huntingtin (Htt) protein. Mutant Htt (mHtt) pathogenicity is proposed to rely on its malfunction and propensity to misfold and aggregate. Htt has scaffolding properties and has been reported to interact with hundreds of partners. Many [...]
Friedreich’s ataxia (FRDA) is an autosomal recessive disease caused by mutations that produce a deficiency in frataxin. Despite the importance of neurodegeneration in FRDA, little is known about the consequences of frataxin deficiency in neuronal cells. Here we describe a neuronal cell model for FRDA based on the use of lentiviral vectors that carry minigenes [...]
Liver receptor homolog (LRH-1) is an orphan nuclear receptor (NR5A2) that regulates cholesterol homeostasis and cell plasticity in endodermal-derived tissues. Estrogen increases LRH-1 expression conveying cell protection and proliferation. Independently, estrogen also protects isolated human islets against cytokine-induced apoptosis. Herein, we demonstrate that LRH-1 is expressed in islets, including β-cells, and that transcript levels are [...]
The hippocampus has a highly ordered structure and is composed of distinct layers. Neuronal migration is an essential part of the process of the layer formation because neurons are primarily generated near the ventricle and must migrate to arrive at their final locat ions during brain development. Impairment of brain development is thought to underlie [...]
Huntington’s disease is initiated by the expression of a CAG repeat-encoded polyglutamine region in full-length huntingtin, with dominant effects that vary continuously with CAG size. The mechanism could involve a simple gain of function or a more complex gain of function coupled to a loss of function (e.g. dominant negative-graded loss of function). To distinguish [...]
High-grade myopia (HM) is highly heritable, and has a high prevalence in the Han Chinese population. We carried out a genome-wide association study involving 102 HM cases suffering from retinal degeneration, and 335 controls who were free from HM and fundus diseases. Significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms were replicated in two follow-up studies: stage I involved 2628 [...]
