Therapeutic potential of relaxin or relaxin mimetics in managing cardiovascular complications of diabetes.

Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disease with an escalating global prevalence. Despite the abundance and relative efficacies of current therapeutic approaches, they primarily focus on attaining the intended glycaemic targets, but patients ultimately still suffer from various diabetes-associated complications such as retinopathy, nephropathy, cardiomyopathy, and atherosclerosis. There is a need to explore innovative and effective diabetic treatment strategies that not only address the condition itself but also combat its complications.

Time-dependent specific molecular signatures of inflammation and remodelling are associated with trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO)-induced endothelial cell dysfunction.

Endothelial dysfunction is a critical initiating factor contributing to cardiovascular diseases, involving the gut microbiome-derived metabolite trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO). This study aims to clarify the time-dependent molecular pathways by which TMAO mediates endothelial dysfunction through transcriptomics and metabolomics analyses in human microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC-1). Cell viability and reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation were also evaluated.

Singapore Undiagnosed Disease Program: Genomic Analysis aids Diagnosis and Clinical Management.

Objective: Use next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology to improve our diagnostic yield in patients with suspected genetic disorders in the Asian setting.

Design: A diagnostic study conducted between 2014 and 2019 (and ongoing) under the Singapore Undiagnosed Disease Program. Date of last analysis was 1 July 2019.

ChronQC: a quality control monitoring system for clinical next generation sequencing.

Summary: ChronQC is a quality control (QC) tracking system for clinical implementation of next-generation sequencing (NGS). ChronQC generates time series plots for various QC metrics to allow comparison of current runs to historical runs. ChronQC has multiple features for tracking QC data including Westgard rules for clinical validity, laboratory-defined thresholds and historical observations within a specified time period.

Selective influence of Sox2 on POU transcription factor binding in embryonic and neural stem cells.

Embryonic stem cell (ESC) identity is orchestrated by co-operativity between the transcription factors (TFs) Sox2 and the class V POU-TF Oct4 at composite Sox/Oct motifs. Neural stem cells (NSCs) lack Oct4 but express Sox2 and class III POU-TFs Oct6, Brn1 and Brn2. This raises the question of how Sox2 interacts with POU-TFs to transcriptionally specify ESCs versus NSCs.

Comprehensive analysis of transcriptome variation uncovers known and novel driver events in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

RNA-seq is a promising technology to re-sequence protein coding genes for the identification of single nucleotide variants (SNV), while simultaneously obtaining information on structural variations and gene expression perturbations. We asked whether RNA-seq is suitable for the detection of driver mutations in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL). These leukemias are caused by a combination of gene fusions, over-expression of transcription factors and cooperative point mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes.