Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the United States. Damage in the cardiovascular system can be due to environmental exposure, trauma, drug toxicity, or numerous other factors. As a result, cardiac tissue and vasculature undergo structural changes and display diminished function.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe mutually antagonistic relationship of atypical protein kinase C (aPKC) and partitioning-defective protein 6 (Par6) with the substrate lethal (2) giant larvae (Lgl) is essential for regulating polarity across many cell types. Although aPKC-Par6 phosphorylates Lgl at three serine sites to exclude it from the apical domain, aPKC-Par6 and Lgl paradoxically form a stable kinase-substrate complex, with conflicting roles proposed for Par6. We report the structure of human aPKCι-Par6α bound to full-length Llgl1, captured through an aPKCι docking site and a Par6 contact.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMelanomas on the dorsum of the hand are exceedingly rare, with limited documentation in medical literature. This report presents seven cases of dorsal hand and finger melanomas, encompassing patients from Australia, New Zealand and Turkey, predominantly women with a mean age of 53 years. The majority were invasive, with a mean Breslow thickness of 1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCardiomyopathy is the leading cause of death in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD); however, in the mdx mouse model of DMD, the cardiac phenotype differs from that seen in DMD-associated cardiomyopathy. Although some have used pharmacologic stress to stimulate injury and enhance cardiac pathology in the mdx model, many methods lead to high mortality with variable cardiac outcomes, and do not recapitulate the structural and functional cardiac changes seen in human disease. Here, we describe a simple and effective method to enhance the cardiac phenotype model in mdx mice using advanced 2D and 4D high-frequency ultrasound to monitor cardiac dysfunction progression in vivo.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTemporal ecological niche partitioning is an underappreciated driver of speciation. While insects have long been models for circadian biology, the genes and circuits that allow adaptive changes in diel-niches remain poorly understood. We compared gene expression in closely related day- and night-active non-model wild silk moths, with otherwise similar ecologies.
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