Gain-of-function mutations in stimulator of interferon gene 1 (STING1) result in STING-associated vasculopathy with onset in infancy (SAVI), a severe autoinflammatory disease. Although elevated type I interferon (IFN) production is thought to be the leading cause of the symptoms observed in patients, STING can induce a set of pathways, which have roles in the onset and severity of SAVI and remain to be elucidated. To this end, we performed a multi-omics comparative analysis of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and plasma from SAVI patients and healthy controls, combined with a dataset of healthy PBMCs treated with IFN-β.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFKRAS is one of the most common mutations detected in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, and it is a marker of poor prognosis. The first FDA-approved KRAS inhibitors, sotorasib and adagrasib, have been an enormous breakthrough for patients with KRAS mutant NSCLC; however, resistance to therapy is emerging. The transcriptional coactivators YAP1/TAZ and the family of transcription factors TEAD1-4 are the downstream effectors of the Hippo pathway and regulate essential cellular processes such as cell proliferation and cell survival.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSince the decoding of the Human Genome, techniques from bioinformatics, statistics, and machine learning have been instrumental in uncovering patterns in increasing amounts and types of different data produced by technical profiling technologies applied to clinical samples, animal models, and cellular systems. Yet, progress on unravelling biological mechanisms, causally driving diseases, has been limited, in part due to the inherent complexity of biological systems. Whereas we have witnessed progress in the areas of cancer, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, the area of neurodegenerative diseases has proved to be very challenging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPatterns of hydrophobic and hydrophilic residues (binary patterns) play an important role in protein architecture and can be roughly categorized into two classes regarding their preferential participation in alpha-helices or beta-strands. However, a single binary pattern can be embedded into different longer patterns carrying opposite structural information and thus cannot be as much informative as expected. Here, we consider conditional binary patterns, or hydrophobic clusters, whose existence is conditioned by the presence of a minimum number of nonhydrophobic residues, called the connectivity distance, that separate two hydrophobic amino acids assumed to belong to two distinct patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To determine the value of known computed tomographic (CT) criteria to differentiate non-complicated from complicated (strangulation, necrosis) small bowel obstruction.
Materials And Methods: 43 patients with a definitive diagnosis of small bowel obstruction based on clinical, sonographic, CT, surgical and pathological findings were included. All patients had small bowel obstruction caused by adhesions confirmed at surgery.
Ten years after the idea of hydrophobic cluster analysis (HCA) was conceived and first published, theoretical and practical experience has shown this unconventional method of protein sequence analysis to be particularly efficient and sensitive, especially with families of sequences sharing low levels of sequence identity. This extreme sensitivity has made it possible to predict the functions of genes whose sequence similarities are hardly if at all detectable by current one-dimensional (1D) methods alone, and offers a new way to explore the enormous amount of data generated by genome sequencing. HCA also provides original tools to understand fundamental features of protein stability and folding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotivation: When routinely analysing protein sequences, detailed analysis of database search results made with BLAST and FASTA becomes exceedingly time consuming and tedious work, as the resultant file may contain a list of hundreds of potential homologies. The interpretation of these results is usually carried out with a text editor which is not a convenient tool for this analysis. In addition, the format of data within BLAST and FASTA output files makes them difficult to read.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLoops are regions of non-repetitive conformation connecting regular secondary structures. They are both the most difficult and error prone regions of a protein to solve by X-ray crystallography and the hardest regions to model using comparative procedures. Although a loop can sometimes be modelled from a homologue, very often it must be selected from outside the family.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLoops are regions of nonrepetitive conformation connecting regular secondary structures. We identified 2,024 loops of one to eight residues in length, with acceptable main-chain bond lengths and peptide bond angles, from a database of 223 protein and protein-domain structures. Each loop is characterized by its sequence, main-chain conformation, and relative disposition of its bounding secondary structures as described by the separation between the tips of their axes and the angle between them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLoops are regions of non-repetitive conformation connecting regular secondary structures. They are both the most difficult and error prone regions of a protein to solve by X-ray crystallography and the hardest regions to model using knowledge-based procedures. While the core of a protein can be straight forwardly modelled from the structurally conserved regions of homologues of known structure, loops must be modelled from a selected homologue or from a loop chosen from outside the family.
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