Project description:Is there a correlation between miRNA diversity and levels of organismic complexity? Exhibiting extraordinary levels of morphological and developmental complexity, insects are the most diverse animal class on earth. Their evolutionary success was in particular shaped by the innovation of holometabolan metamorphosis in endopterygotes. Previously, miRNA evolution had been linked to morphological complexity, but astonishing variation in the currently available miRNA complements of insects made this link unclear. To address this issue, we sequenced the miRNA complement of the hemimetabolan Blattella germanica and reannotated that of two other hemimetabolan species, Locusta migratoria and Acyrthosiphon pisum, and of four holometabolan species, Apis mellifera, Tribolium castaneum, Bombyx mori and Drosophila melanogaster. Our analyses show that the variation of insect miRNAs is an artefact mainly resulting from poor sampling and inaccurate miRNA annotation, and that insects share a conserved microRNA toolkit of 65 families exhibiting very low variation. For example, the evolutionary shift toward a complete metamorphosis was accompanied only by the acquisition of three and the loss of one miRNA families.
Project description:Non Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) causes the premature death of over 1 million people worldwide each year, but remains inadequately understood at the molecular level. To provide new insights for NSCLC treatment we performed a molecular characterisation of wild type and platinum drugs resistance in A549 cells. Transcriptome profiling revealed contrasting patterns of gene expression in sensitive and resistant cells and identified genes whose expression was highly correlated with the platinum drugs. Our results revealed a gene set of 15 transcripts whose expression was highly correlated with platinum-resistance in NSCLC A549 cell lines.
Project description:Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is frequently diagnosed in patients with late-stage disease who are ineligible for curative surgical therapies. Furthermore, the majority of patients become resistant to sorafenib. Recently, computational methods for drug repurposing have shown great promise to accelerate the discovery of new uses for existing drugs. In order to identify novel drugs for use against sorafenib resistant (SR)-HCC, we employed a transcriptomics-based drug repurposing method termed connectivity mapping. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of available in vitro and in vivo gene signatures of (SR)-HCC, and generated our own in vitro model using the Huh7 HCC cell line. We compared coverage of SR-HCC gene signatures across seven patient-derived HCC gene expression datasets, and observed that patients harboring the Huh7 SR-HCC gene signature had significantly reduced survival. Utilizing the Huh7 SR-HCC gene signature, we applied connectivity mapping to drug-induced gene expression profiles (n= 3,740 drugs) in the HepG2 HCC cell line from the LINCS database in order to find drugs that could oppose sorafenib resistance. We validated the use of two non-receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors, dasatinib and fostamatinib, to reduce viability of sorafenib-resistant HCC cells and confirmed up-regulated activity of Src family kinases, the targets of dasatinib, in our SR-HCC models. We prospectively validated predicted gene expression changes in fostamatinib treated Huh7-SR via RNA-seq analysis.
Project description:RNA interference (RNAi) functions as the major host antiviral defense in insects, while less is understood about how to utilize antiviral RNAi in controlling viral infection in insects. Enoxacin belongs to the family of synthetic antibacterial compounds based on a fluoroquinolone skeleton that has been previously found to enhance RNAi in mammalian cells. In this study, we showed that enoxacin efficiently inhibited viral replication of Drosophila C virus (DCV) and Cricket paralysis virus (CrPV) in cultured Drosophila cells. Enoxacin promoted the loading of Dicer-2-processed virus-derived siRNA into the RNA-induced silencing complex, thereby enhancing antiviral RNAi response in infected cells. Moreover, enoxacin treatment elicited an RNAi-dependent in vivo protective efficacy against DCV or CrPV challenge in adult fruit flies. In addition, enoxacin also inhibited replication of flaviviruses, including Dengue virus and Zika virus, in Aedes mosquito cells in an RNAi-dependent manner. Together, our findings demonstrated that enoxacin can enhance RNAi in insects, and enhancing RNAi by enoxacin is an effective antiviral strategy against diverse viruses in insects, which may be exploited as a broad-spectrum antiviral agent to control vector transmission of arboviruses or viral diseases in insect farming.