Project description:Strategies that promote functional organ growth with minimal adverse effects are the ultimate goal of regenerative medicine but no single approach is currently available for organ level repair. Here, using an evolutionary adapted in vivo infection model - Mycobacterium leprae, with host cell reprogramming ability and its natural animal host, the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) that harbor bacteria in the highly regenerative liver - we present an in vivo model for promoting adult liver growth at organ level without adverse effects. Experimentally infected armadillos harboring bacteria in the liver, but not infection-resistant or drug-treated animals, showed a significantly increased total liver: body weight ratio, indicative of bacterial-driven liver organ growth in living animals. The machine-learning approach revealed an increase in healthy liver lobule number with a proportionate expansion of the hepatocyte mass with integrating vasculature and biliary networks responsible for functional liver growth. Intriguingly, infected enlarged livers show intact microarchitecture but without evidence of hepatocellular damage, fibrosis/scarring or tumorigenesis. Reactivation of armadillo liver progenitor and developmental genes/proteins, as well as upregulation of growth-, metabolism- and differentiation-associated markers with minimal change in oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes, suggests that bacteria have adapted dynamic regenerative, homeostasis and reprogramming mechanisms to promote de novo organogenesis while maintaining tissue integrity and tumor preventive strategies for host-dependent bacterial propagation. Thus, our model may facilitate the unravelling of in vivo endogenous regenerative pathways that effectively re-engage liver organ growth, with broad implications.
Project description:The uterine cervix is the boundary structure between the uterus and the vagina and is a key component of the female reproductive tract for the maintenance of pregnancy and timing of parturition. Here we report on a comparative transcriptomic study of the cervix of four placental mammal species, mouse, guinea pig, rabbit and the basal eutherian mammal, armadillo, Dasypus novemcinctus, and one marsupial species, Monodelphis domestica. Our aim is to investigate the evolution of cervical gene expression as related to putative mechanisms for functional progesterone withdrawal. Our main findings are: 1) The patterns of gene expression found in eutherian species is consistent with the notion that an increase in the ratio of E/P4 signaling strength is critical for cervical remodeling. How the increased E/P4 ratio is achieved, however, is variable between eutherian species. 2) None of the genes related to steroid signaling modulated in eutherian species change expression during opossum gestation, suggesting that the role of P4 signaling in cervical remodeling evolved after the common ancestor of marsupials and placental mammals. 3) A tendency for decreased expression of progesterone receptor co-activators (NCOA1, -2 and -3, and CREBP) towards term is a shared derived feature of eutherians. This finding suggests that parturition is associated with broad scale histone de-acetylation. We tested this hypothesis by performing Western-blotting on mouse cervix and found evidence for a striking degree of histone de-acetylation in labor. This finding may have important implications for the control of premature cervical remodeling and preterm birth in humans.
2017-07-31 | GSE85815 | GEO
Project description:Natural variation of Paracoccidioides isolated from nine-banded armadillos (Dasypus novencinctus)
Project description:Microbiome sequencing model is a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model that identifies and annotates microbiome nucleic acid sequencing method or platform in texts. This is the final model version used to annotate metagenomics publications in Europe PMC and enrich metagenomics studies in MGnify with sequencing metadata from literature. For more information, please refer to the following blogs: http://blog.europepmc.org/2020/11/europe-pmc-publications-metagenomics-annotations.html https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/service-news/enriched-metadata-fields-mgnify-based-text-mining-associated-publications
Project description:An updated representation of S. meliloti metabolism that was manually-curated and encompasses information from 240 literature sources, which includes transposon-sequencing (Tn-seq) data and Phenotype MicroArray data for wild-type and mutant strains.