Project description:Cognitively normal brains are compared to sporadic AD and Down syndrome brains with AD for comparison of two different forms of Alzheimer's disease
Project description:SAT1 is the mammalian polyamine acetylation enzyme. In order to characterize the transcriptional alterations resulting from SAT1 ablation in tumor cells in vivo, we knocked out SAT1 in a genetic glioma model (PTEN/P53/NF1 knockout) and performed RNAseq.
Project description:Human mesothelial peritoneal cells from high grade serous ovarian carcinoma patients were subjected to TNFalpha, IL17-A and combination treatment.
Project description:The capacity to deal with stress declines during the aging process, and preservation of cellular stress responses is critical to healthy aging. The unfolded protein response of the endoplasmic reticulum (UPRER) is one such conserved mechanism which is critical for the maintenance of several major functions of the ER during stress, including protein folding and lipid metabolism. Hyperactivation of the UPRER by overexpression of the major transcription factor, xbp-1s, solely in neurons drives lifespan extension as neurons send a neurotransmitter-based signal to other tissue to activate UPRER in a non-autonomous fashion. Previous work identified serotonergic and dopaminergic neurons in this signaling paradigm. To further expand our understanding of the neural circuitry that underlies the non-autonomous signaling of ER stress, we activated UPRER solely in glutamatergic, octopaminergic, and GABAergic neurons in C. elegans and paired whole-body transcriptomic analysis with functional assays. We found that UPRER-induced signals from glutamatergic neurons increased expression of canonical protein homeostasis pathways and octopaminergic neurons promoted pathogen response pathways, while minor, but statistically significant changes were observed in lipid metabolism-related genes with GABAergic UPRER activation. These findings provide further evidence for the distinct role neuronal subtypes play in driving the diverse response to ER stress.
Project description:Mechanical stress is a measure of internal resistance exhibited by a body or material when external forces, such as compression, tension, bending, etc. are applied. The study of mechanical stress on health and aging is a continuously growing field, as major changes to the extracellular matrix and cell-to-cell adhesions can result in dramatic changes to tissue stiffness during aging and diseased conditions. For example, during normal aging, many tissues including the ovaries, skin, blood vessels, and heart exhibit increased stiffness, which can result in a significant reduction in function of that organ. As such, numerous model systems have recently emerged to study the impact of mechanical and physical stress on cell and tissue health, including cell-culture conditions with matrigels and other surfaces that alter substrate stiffness and ex vivo tissue models that can apply stress directly to organs like muscle or tendons. Here, we sought to develop a novel method in an in vivo, model organism setting to study the impact of mechanical stress on aging, by increasing substrate stiffness in solid agar medium of C. elegans. To our surprise, we found shockingly limited impact of growth of C. elegans on stiffer substrates, including limited effects on cellular health, gene expression, organismal health, stress resilience, and longevity. Overall, our studies reveal that altering substrate stiffness of growth medium for C. elegans have only mild impact on animal health and longevity; however, these impacts were not nominal and open up important considerations for C. elegans biologists in standardizing agar medium choice for experimental assays.
Project description:Colon cancer patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models were processed to single cells and sorted by FACS (BD FACS Aria II) for ALDH activity (Aldefluor assay) and DAPI. ALDH Negative and ALDH Positive cells from each PDX model were collected and lysed in RLT buffer and processed for RNA using the RNeasy Mini Plus RNA extraction kit (Qiagen). Samples were processed using Illumina’s TrueSeq RNA protocol and sequenced on an Illumina HiSeq 2500 machine as 2x125nt paired-end reads. Reads were mapped to the human reference genome (assembly hg19) using the STAR aligner (version 2.4.2a). Total read counts per gene were computed using the program “featureCounts” (version 1.4.6-p2) in the “subread” package, with the gene annotation taken from Gencode (version 19).
Project description:The transcriptomic innate immune response derived from human nasal epithelial cells depends on how Streptococcus pneumoniae colonises the nasopharynx. This study compared three wild type strains and one deficient in pneumolysin to explore the pathways of epithelial activation following a three hour infection in vitro.
Project description:Small molecule inhibitors of mitochondrial electron transport chain (ETC) hold significant promise in the field of mitochondrial research and aging biology. In this study, we studied two molecules: mycothiazole (MTZ) - isolated from the marine sponge P. mycofijiensis and its semisynthetic acetylated derivative 8-O-acetylmycothiazole (8-OAc) as efficient alternatives for their high efficiency to inhibit ETC complex I function. Similar to rotenone, a widely used complex I inhibitor, these two compounds showed anticancer activity and strikingly demonstrate a lack of toxicity to non-cancer cells, a highly beneficial feature in the development of anti-cancer therapeutics. Furthermore, experiments with these small molecules in vivo utilizing C.elegans demonstrate their additional utilization to aging studies. We observed that both molecules have the ability to induce a mitochondria-specific unfolded protein response (UPRMT) pathway, which extends lifespan of worms when applied in their adult stage. Interestingly, we also found that these two molecules employ different pathways to extend lifespan in worms, where MTZ utilize the transcription factors, ATFS-1 and HSF-1, which are involved in the UPRMT and heat shock response (HSR) pathways, respectively. In opposition,8-OAc only required HSF-1 and not ATFS-1. This observation elucidates an important insight into the functional roles of various protein subunits of ETC complexes and their regulatory mechanisms associated with aging.
Project description:Senecavirus A (SVA) belongs to the genus Senecavirus in the family Picornaviridae. It is increasingly used for proteomic research that tandem mass tag-labeled liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry is combined with the parallel reaction monitoring technique. In this study, this combined method was used to uncover separately proteomic profiles of SVA- and non-infected BSR-T7/5 cells. Further, both proteomic profiles were compared with each other. The proteomic profiling showed that a total of 361 differentially expressed proteins were identified, out of which, 305 and 56 were upregulated and downregulated in SVA-infected cells at 12 h post-inoculation, respectively. GO (Gene Ontology) and KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) enrichment analyses showed that cellular metabolisms were mainly affected in SVA-inoculated cells at an early stage of infection.