Diabetes induces fibrotic changes in the lung through the activation of TGF-β signaling pathways.

In the long term, diabetes profoundly affects multiple organs, such as the kidney, heart, brain, liver, and eyes. The gradual loss of function in these vital organs contributes to mortality. Nonetheless, the effects of diabetes on the lung tissue are not well understood.

Unusual multiscale mechanics of biomimetic nanoparticle hydrogels.

Viscoelastic properties are central for gels and other materials. Simultaneously, high storage and loss moduli are difficult to attain due to their contrarian requirements to chemical structure. Biomimetic inorganic nanoparticles offer a promising toolbox for multiscale engineering of gel mechanics, but a conceptual framework for their molecular, nanoscale, mesoscale, and microscale engineering as viscoelastic materials is absent.

Epigenetics of skin cancer: Interventions by selected bioactive phytochemicals.

The prevalence and risk of skin cancer have been increasing over past three decades. Two major types of skin cancer observed in humans are melanoma and nonmelanoma. Nonmelanoma further subdivided into basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma.

HR-MAS NMR tissue metabolomic signatures cross-validated by mass spectrometry distinguish bladder cancer from benign disease.

Effective diagnosis and surveillance of bladder cancer (BCa) is currently challenged by detection methods that are of poor sensitivity, particularly for low-grade tumors, resulting in unnecessary invasive procedures and economic burden. We performed HR-MAS NMR-based global metabolomic profiling and applied unsupervised principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering performed on NMR data set of bladder-derived tissues and identified metabolic signatures that differentiate BCa from benign disease. A partial least-squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) model (leave-one-out cross-validation) was used as a diagnostic model to distinguish benign and BCa tissues.

MetaboID: a graphical user interface package for assignment of 1H NMR spectra of bodyfluids and tissues.

Nuclear magnetic resonance based measurements of small molecule mixtures continues to be confronted with the challenge of spectral assignment. While multi-dimensional experiments are capable of addressing this challenge, the imposed time constraint becomes prohibitive, particularly with the large sample sets commonly encountered in metabolomic studies. Thus, one-dimensional spectral assignment is routinely performed, guided by two-dimensional experiments on a selected sample subset; however, a publicly available graphical interface for aiding in this process is currently unavailable.

Metabolomic signatures in guinea pigs infected with epidemic-associated W-Beijing strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

With the understanding that the laboratory propagated strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv is of modest virulence and is drug susceptible, in the present study, we performed a nuclear magnetic resonance-based metabolomic analysis of lung tissues and serum obtained from guinea pigs infected by low dose aerosol exposure to clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. High Resolution Magic Angle Spinning NMR coupled with multivariate statistical analysis of 159 lung tissues obtained from multiple locations of age-matched naïve and 30 and 60 days of infected guinea pig lungs revealed a wide dispersal of metabolic patterns, but within these, distinct clusters of signatures could be seen that differentiated between naive control and infected animals. Several metabolites were identified that changed in concert with the progression of each infection.

Delineating metabolic signatures of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma: phospholipase A2, a potential therapeutic target.

A better understanding of molecular pathways involved in malignant transformation of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is essential for the development of novel and efficient anti-cancer drugs. To delineate the global metabolism of HNSCC, we report (1)H NMR-based metabolic profiling of HNSCC cells from five different patients that were derived from various sites of the upper aerodigestive tract, including the floor of mouth, tongue and larynx. Primary cultures of normal human oral keratinocytes (NHOK) from three different donors were used for comparison.

Variable reference alignment: an improved peak alignment protocol for NMR spectral data with large intersample variation.

In an effort to address the variable correspondence problem across large sample cohorts common in metabolomic/metabonomic studies, we have developed a prealignment protocol that aims to generate spectral segments sharing a common target spectrum. Under the assumption that a single reference spectrum will not correctly represent all spectra of a data set, the goal of this approach is to perform local alignment corrections on spectral regions which share a common "most similar" spectrum. A natural beneficial outcome of this procedure is the automatic definition of spectral segments, a feature that is not common to all alignment methods.

Magic angle spinning NMR-based metabolic profiling of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma tissues.

High-resolution magic-angle spinning (HR-MAS) proton NMR spectroscopy is used to explore the metabolic signatures of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) which included matched normal adjacent tissue (NAT) and tumor originating from tongue, lip, larynx and oral cavity, and associated lymph-node metastatic (LN-Met) tissues. A total of 43 tissues (18 NAT, 18 Tumor and 7 LN-Met) from 22 HNSCC patients were analyzed. Principal Component Analysis of NMR data showed a clear classification between NAT and tumor tissues, however, LN-Met tissues were classified among tumor.