Reducing Pericyte-Derived Scarring Promotes Recovery after Spinal Cord Injury.

CNS injury often severs axons. Scar tissue that forms locally at the lesion site is thought to block axonal regeneration, resulting in permanent functional deficits. We report that inhibiting the generation of progeny by a subclass of pericytes led to decreased fibrosis and extracellular matrix deposition after spinal cord injury in mice.

The Impact of Endurance Training on Human Skeletal Muscle Memory, Global Isoform Expression and Novel Transcripts.

Regularly performed endurance training has many beneficial effects on health and skeletal muscle function, and can be used to prevent and treat common diseases e.g. cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes and obesity.

The age and genomic integrity of neurons after cortical stroke in humans.

It has been unclear whether ischemic stroke induces neurogenesis or neuronal DNA rearrangements in the human neocortex. Using immunohistochemistry; transcriptome, genome and ploidy analyses; and determination of nuclear bomb test-derived (14)C concentration in neuronal DNA, we found neither to be the case. A large proportion of cortical neurons displayed DNA fragmentation and DNA repair a short time after stroke, whereas neurons at chronic stages after stroke showed DNA integrity, demonstrating the relevance of an intact genome for survival.

Comprehensive analysis of the genome transcriptome and proteome landscapes of three tumor cell lines.

We here present a comparative genome, transcriptome and functional network analysis of three human cancer cell lines (A431, U251MG and U2OS), and investigate their relation to protein expression. Gene copy numbers significantly influenced corresponding transcript levels; their effect on protein levels was less pronounced. We focused on genes with altered mRNA and/or protein levels to identify those active in tumor maintenance.

Comparison of total and cytoplasmic mRNA reveals global regulation by nuclear retention and miRNAs.

Background: The majority of published gene-expression studies have used RNA isolated from whole cells, overlooking the potential impact of including nuclear transcriptome in the analyses. In this study, mRNA fractions from the cytoplasm and from whole cells (total RNA) were prepared from three human cell lines and sequenced using massive parallel sequencing.

Results: For all three cell lines, of about 15000 detected genes approximately 400 to 1400 genes were detected in different amounts in the cytoplasmic and total RNA fractions.

Validation of whole genome amplification for analysis of the p53 tumor suppressor gene in limited amounts of tumor samples.

Personalized cancer treatment requires molecular characterization of individual tumor biopsies. These samples are frequently only available in limited quantities hampering genomic analysis. Several whole genome amplification (WGA) protocols have been developed with reported varying representation of genomic regions post amplification.