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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...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
Novel coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2 has gripped the entire world. Infected individuals keep shedding the virus in respiratory droplets even before showing symptoms because of high viral load in their upper respiratory tract. The virus is also detectable in blood and feces of the infected people. COVID-19 symptoms mainly include fever, fatigue, dry cough and difficulty breathing, which may develop into severe pneumonia. To...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
The most common chronic liver disorder worldwide is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). This obesity-linked disorder can manifest as hepatic fat accumulation (steatosis) with inflammation called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). NASH can progress to fibrosis, cirrhosis and cancer. Stress conditions and impaired autophagy can contribute to steatosis and fibrosis. Stressors like ...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
Coronaviruses are a family of enveloped RNA viruses. Some family members circulate in human populations, but others like severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) are transmitted from animals to humans. A new strain of coronaviruses called novel coronavirus (nCOV) or SARS-CoV-2 is also transmitted zoonotically. SARS-CoV-2 has caused a global infectious disease called COVID-19. A person catches this notorious illness when he/she comes in contact with respiratory...
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By Christina Towers, PhD
Mitochondrial turn over via the lysosome, otherwise known as mitophagy, involves engulfment of mitochondria into double membrane autophagosomes and subsequent fusion with lysosomes. Much is already known about this process including the canonical and non-canonical mechanisms of action, the critical machinery involved, as well as the...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
Insulin resistance in adipocytes is a major feature of metabolic syndrome . Disrupted adipose tissue metabolism can lead to accumulation of lipid intermediates in insulin-sensitive tissues like liver and skeletal muscles, thereby diminishing insulin sensitivity. A key enzyme in adipocytes that mobilizes free fatty acids from adipose tissue into the bloodstream is...
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By Michalina Hanzel, PhD
The microbiota-gut-brain axis is a bidirectional relationship between the central and enteric nervous systems, which is heavily influenced by the microorganisms living in the gut. Accumulating evidence has pointed to the microbiome, composed mostly of bacteria, but also including archaea, fungi and viruses, as instrumental in maintaining human physiological functions.1 Importantly, the brain is influenced by various bacterial metabolites,...
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By Jamshed Arslan, Pharm. D., PhD.
We live in a world where 39% of adults are overweight. Our meals trigger the secretion of various gut-derived metabolic hormones called incretins. Fats and carbohydrates in our diet stimulate the release of an incretin from the duodenum called glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide or gastric inhibitory polypeptide (GIP). GIP acts on its receptor (GIPR) in adipocytes and pancreas to promote fatty acid uptake and insulin...
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By Christina Towers, PhD
Over the last two decades the field of autophagy has exploded! Innovative techniques, comprehensive analysis and disease-relevant models have yielded basic and clinical discoveries of consequence. The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi in 2016, for his ground-breaking work in yeast to identify many of the core autophagy proteins. Since then, the field has only expanded. In just the past year, the field has produced numerous...
