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By Natalia Gurule, PhD
Historically, DNA repair pathways have been viewed from a tumor cell centric vantage point. Currently, the tumor microenvironment (TME) is recognized as having the potential to be a source of components that can participate in how a cancer cell responds to DNA damage. Within the TME, there are metabolites that can promote tumor cell growth and modulate immune cell...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Neurodegenerative disorders involve loss of function and, ultimately, death of neurons. Selective neuronal vulnerability has been observed in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. For example, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and spinocerebellar ataxia type 2 (SCA2) attack motor neurons, while Alzheimer’s disease (AD),...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
SARS-CoV-2 induces both humoral and cellular immunity. A vaccine or natural infection invokes SARS-CoV-2-specific humoral components (antibodies from activated B cells) and cellular response (CD4+, CD8+ T cells) that can protect against subsequent infections. Following SARS-CoV-2 infection, the levels of...
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By Victoria Osinski, PhD
An exciting new study by Casasola-LaMacchia et al. was published earlier this year presenting a novel mass spectrometry method for detecting different MHC class...
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By Victoria Osinski
Pyroptosis is an inflammatory form of programmed cell death characterized by the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β and IL-18.1,10 It is a process distinct from apoptosis and necrosis (Table 1) and has been observed in the setting of multiple diseases including, but...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Humans rely on the pancreas for digesting food and generating energy from it. SARS-CoV-2-mediated damage to the exocrine pancreas is evident from the pancreatitis, pancreatic enlargement, and abnormal levels of digestive enzymes in severe COVID-19. Likewise, increased propensity for hyperglycemia,...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Cholesterol is an essential part of animal cell membranes. Cholesterol-rich lipid rafts maintain the fluidity and protein trafficking of plasma membranes. Cellular ABCA1 protein moves cholesterol and certain fats outside of the cell. Dysregulated lipid rafts and cholesterol metabolism...
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Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein is the main target of COVID-19 vaccines. Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are RNA-based vaccines while...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Vaccination generates protective adaptive immune memory without the need for an actual viral infection. COVID-19 vaccines help recognize and fight off SARS-CoV-2 infection. In December 2020, US-FDA approved mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Hippo signaling pathway may be regarded as a master regulator of organ growth. Hippo pathway is a sensor for cellular and tissue integrity that does not seem to have dedicated extracellular ligands or receptors. The downstream effectors of Hippo serine/threonine kinase signaling are two structurally and functionally similar proteins, Yap1 and Taz. These two proteins are transcriptional co-activators, which means that they themselves are unable to bind to the...
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By Emily Cartwright, PhD
When it's late in the afternoon and you smell a delicious bag of popcorn in the microwave, your mouth begins to water and your stomach starts to grumble. These behaviors are a result of communication between your enteric nervous system (ENS) and brain. The ENS is an arm of the peripheral nervous system and is critically important for function of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, controlling everything from salivation to excretion. Dysfunction of the ENS leads to...
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By Victoria Osinski
Pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) recognize and respond to Pattern- and Damage-associated molecular patterns (PAMP and DAMPs) in a number of different cell types. The PRR family can be broken down into sub-families of receptors (Table 1). While first identified in the context of infection, these receptors and signaling pathways are involved in many disease contexts including ischemia, cancer, atherosclerosis, and autoimmunity.2,16,18 Broadly, PRR signaling can regulate cell death...
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By Victoria Osinski
The outbreak of COVID-19 resulting from the transmission of the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in many cases of illness typically manifesting in minor to severe respiratory symptoms. However, additional cardiovascular complications have been observed in a subset of patients as well, prompting further inquiry into the mechanisms of infection and response to SARS-CoV-2. While advancements have been made into answering these questions, it is still...
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By Christina Towers, PhD
The cellular recycling process known as autophagy is currently being targeted in over 60 clinical trials focused on treating different types of cancer1. To date, the only autophagy-targeted agents used in patients are late stage autophagy inhibitors that target the lysosome, including chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). Over the...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
There is good news and bad news related to COVID-19, a disease caused by SARS-COV-2 infection. Good news first: the vast majority of otherwise healthy individuals remain asymptomatic. The bad news though is that even the asymptomatic population is at risk for COVID-19-related brain damage called NeuroCOVID. The neurological manifestations related to COVID-19 may be less severe and less frequent in milder cases as compared to the hospitalized patients. This article will outline the mechanism behind NeuroCOVID and COVID-19-related neuropsychological...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm D, PhD
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women that causes the greatest number of cancer-related deaths worldwide. After radiotherapy or cytotoxic chemotherapy like paclitaxel, the surviving breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs) lead to tumor recurrence and metastasis. Resistant BCSCs undergo self-renewal and multi-lineage differentiation similar to embryonic stem cells (ESCs). The master regulators for such...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
December 1 is the World AIDS Day. Despite the combination antiretroviral therapy, 10-25% of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)-positive individuals report neurocognitive impairments, especially those taking addictive stimulants like methamphetamine. HIV disrupts mitophagy and...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
Mammalian cell metabolism is incomplete without glucose . Glucose is a monosaccharide that is transported to the cells through facilitative diffusion, a process governed by membrane proteins like glucose transporters (GluTs).1 GluTs belong to a large family of...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
Death is perhaps inevitable. Cell death can be programed and immunologically silent (apoptosis), unprogrammed and inflammatory (necrosis), or both programmed and inflammatory (necroptosis). Ligands like TNF, FasL and...
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By Kate Wilmore
This year Bio-Techne was honored to receive the CiteAb Researchers' Choice Award . This award recognizes and celebrates the very best suppliers and individuals in the research reagent sector worldwide. The Researchers' Choice category is based on both the quantity and quality of the nominations submitted by investigators, which reflects their opinion on the excellence of products and services offered by life sciences companies.
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By Rosa Moreno, PhD.
As the race for developing a vaccine to tackle the ongoing coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic evolves, scientists at NIH, CDC and Harvard Medical School continue to make strides in understanding the often-unpredictable pathology and immune response associated with SARS-CoV-2 infections. Several recent studies shed light on the organ and tissue distribution of the virus following infection, the predominant tissue damage induced by the virus, and the immune responses triggered by infection. These findings, the product of studies with animal models and...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
The immune system protects living organisms against harmful substances. B cells ward off infections by producing antibodies to invading pathogens. Conventional antibodies are stable only at a narrow range of temperature and pH. They are also too big to penetrate tissues or to bind with many active sites on proteins. Thankfully, sharks and camelids like llamas...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
The cellular pathway comprising tyrosine kinase Janus Kinase (JAK) and the transcription factor STAT connect extracellular signals from various cytokines, hormones and growth factors with the nuclear transcription machinery. Four JAK proteins (JAK1, JAK2, JAK3, TYK2) and seven...
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By Christina Towers, PhD
A novel vesicular organelle was recently discovered in 2015 by a research group at Tsinghua University headed by Dr. Yu that is dependent on cell migration and named accordingly as migrasomes1. They are classified as extracellular...
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By Christina Towers, PhD
The selective degradation of mitochondria via double membrane autophagosome vesicles is called mitophagy. Damaged mitochondria can generate harmful amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS), accumulate damaged mitochondrial DNA, and induce cell death. Mitophagy functions in coordination with mitochondrial biogenesis and changes in mitochondrial dynamics to maintain...
