Project description:Dyskeratosis congenita (DC) is an inherited multi-system disorder, characterized by oral leukoplakia, nail dystrophy, and abnormal skin pigmentation, as well as high rates of bone marrow failure, solid tumors, and other medical problems such as osteopenia. DC and telomere biology disorders (collectively referred to as TBD here) are caused by germline mutations in telomere biology genes leading to very short telomeres and limited proliferative potential of hematopoietic stem cells. We found that skeletal stem cells (SSCs) within the bone marrow stromal cell population (BMSCs, also known as bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells), may contribute to the hematological phenotype. TBD-BMSCs exhibited reduced clonogenicity, reduced telomerase activity, spontaneous differentiation into adipocytes and fibrotic cells, and increased senescence in vitro. Upon in vivo transplantation into mice, TBD-BMSCs failed to form bone or support hematopoiesis, unlike normal BMSCs. TERC reduction (a TBD-associated gene) in normal BMSCs by siTERC-RNA recapitulated the TBD-BMSC phenotype by reducing proliferation and secondary colony forming efficiency, and by accelerating senescence in vitro. Microarray profiles of control and siTERC-BMSCs showed decreased hematopoietic factors at the mRNA level, and decreased secretion of factors at the protein level. These findings are consistent with defects in SSCs/BMSCs contributing to bone marrow failure in TBD.
Project description:Purpose: to understand the mechanisms of vaccines in the lymph nodes of mice Methods: mice were treated with mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine or the yellow fever vaccine. The draining inguinal or illiac lymph nodes were harvested 1, 3, or 7 days after treatment and analyzed by scRNA-seq Results: TBD Conclusions: TBD
Project description:Purpose: To understand the innate immune response to an adjuvant, 3M052, and yellow fever vaccine, YFV Methods: Draining lymph nodes were negatively selected for CD19+ and CD3+, then flow sorted into four populations: Dendritic cells (DCs), Double positive cells (DP, CD11b+BST1+), Ly6c+ cells (Ly6c), and plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs). Lymph nodes were harvested at baseline (D0), 24 hours post-treatment (D1) or 28 days post-treatment (D28). Results: TBD Conclusions: TBD
Project description:Dyskeratosis congenita (DC) is an inherited multi-system disorder, characterized by oral leukoplakia, nail dystrophy, and abnormal skin pigmentation, as well as high rates of bone marrow failure, solid tumors, and other medical problems such as osteopenia. DC and telomere biology disorders (collectively referred to as TBD here) are caused by germline mutations in telomere biology genes leading to very short telomeres and limited proliferative potential of hematopoietic stem cells. We found that skeletal stem cells (SSCs) within the bone marrow stromal cell population (BMSCs, also known as bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells), may contribute to the hematological phenotype. TBD-BMSCs exhibited reduced clonogenicity, reduced telomerase activity, spontaneous differentiation into adipocytes and fibrotic cells, and increased senescence in vitro. Upon in vivo transplantation into mice, TBD-BMSCs failed to form bone or support hematopoiesis, unlike normal BMSCs. TERC reduction (a TBD-associated gene) in normal BMSCs by siTERC-RNA recapitulated the TBD-BMSC phenotype by reducing proliferation and secondary colony forming efficiency, and by accelerating senescence in vitro. Microarray profiles of control and siTERC-BMSCs showed decreased hematopoietic factors at the mRNA level, and decreased secretion of factors at the protein level. These findings are consistent with defects in SSCs/BMSCs contributing to bone marrow failure in TBD. RNA (5 mg) isolated from N-BMSCs, siNC-BMSCs and siTERC-BMSCs 72hrs after transfection using an RNeasy Mini kit (Qiagen), was reverse transcribed and hybridized to an Affymetrix GeneChip Human Genome U133 Plus 2.0 array (LMT, NCI-Frederick). Three independent replicates for each experimental condition were carried out to control for intra-sample variation. Genes that were under/over-represented by >2-fold were analyzed using GeneSpring software. Signal intensity values were normalized using RMA (Robust Multi-array Analysis) summarization and baseline transformation to median of all samples was performed. Entities were filtered based on their signal intensity values. Hierarchical clustering was performed on filtered signal intensity (>20.0), non-averaged, fold change >2. A fold change analysis (>10-fold) was performed to generate a list of top genes under/over represented between the groups.
Project description:The activities of the dithiolethione analogs, D3T, OLT, and TBD are pharmacologically well-understood. These compounds act as chemopreventive agents whose ability is to block or diminish early stages of carcinogenesis. In addition, the three compounds are classified as monofunctional Phase II enzyme inducers and activate the same pathway, namely the Keap1-Nrf2 signal pathway. The three dithiolethiones were showed to ameliorate the AFB1-induced toxicity through increasing phase II enzymes including glutathione S-transferase (GST). The parent D3T was observed to be the most potent chemoprotective agent. Oltipraz, a clinically approved drug, has been shown to exhibit less efficacy than its analogs for inhibition of aflatoxin-induced hepatic foci.TBD was suggested to be better than OLT as a chemopreventive agent because of its reduced toxicity profile. Thus based on gene expressions, our goal is to study the closely related structure activities that lie within the three compounds and the activity of OLT versus TBD at the 5 position of their dithiole rings and to determine whether the activity of TBD is closely related to OLT or its parent D3T. Keywords: treatment effects
Project description:DNA methylation profiling of 35 Telomere Biology Disorder (TBD) cases and 20 age-matched controls using the Infinium MethylationEPIC BeadChip arrays (Illumina). The cutoff for methylation differences between the cases and controls was set to |Δβ≥|0.2.