Publications by authors named "A Pavlok"
Background: Huntington disease (HD) is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder involving reduced muscle coordination, mental and behavioral changes, and testicular degeneration. In order to further clarify the decreased fertility and penetration ability of the spermatozoa of transgenic HD minipig boars (TgHD), we applied a set of mitochondrial metabolism (MM) parameter measurements to this promising biological material, which can be collected noninvasively in longitudinal studies.
Objective: We aimed to optimize methods for MM measurements in spermatozoa and to establish possible biomarkers of HD in TgHD spermatozoa expressing the N-terminal part of mutated human huntingtin.
Background: Huntington's disease is induced by CAG expansion in a single gene coding the huntingtin protein. The mutated huntingtin (mtHtt) primarily causes degeneration of neurons in the brain, but it also affects peripheral tissues, including testes.
Objective: We studied sperm and testes of transgenic boars expressing the N-terminal region of human mtHtt.
Background: Some promising treatments for Huntington's disease (HD) may require pre-clinical testing in large animals. Minipig is a suitable species because of its large gyrencephalic brain and long lifespan.
Objective: To generate HD transgenic (TgHD) minipigs encoding huntingtin (HTT)1-548 under the control of human HTT promoter.
Article Synopsis
- Mammalian oocytes commonly experience chromosome segregation errors during meiosis I, leading to serious issues like pregnancy loss and developmental disorders.
- A study used comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) and whole genome amplification (WGA) to investigate aneuploidy in porcine oocytes, particularly from older animals, which has proven to be a more relevant model than rodents.
- The findings reveal that previous methods may have overestimated aneuploidy rates in porcine oocytes, and contrary to other species, older porcine oocytes do not show increased aneuploidy.
Article Synopsis
- The ubiquitin-proteasome system plays a key role in regulating cellular functions by degrading proteins tagged with ubiquitin, with UCHL1 being a significant player in mammalian oocytes.
- Research indicates that low UCHL1 activity is linked to polyspermic fertilization, suggesting its potential involvement in preventing multiple sperm from fertilizing an egg, though the exact mechanism is not fully understood.
- Experiments using UCHL1 inhibitors revealed that these inhibitors not only increased polyspermy in bovine zygotes but also disrupted the normal migration and function of cortical granules, highlighting UCHL1's crucial role in protecting oocytes from polyspermy.