Background: Despite the revolutionary impact of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) on the treatment of metastatic urothelial carcinoma (mUC), the clinical utility of reliable prognostic biomarkers to foresee survival outcomes remains underexplored.
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to ascertain the prognostic significance of serum inflammatory markers in mUC patients undergoing ICI therapy.
Design: This is a retrospective, multicenter study.
Replication Protein A (RPA) is asingle strandedDNA(ssDNA)binding protein that coordinates diverse DNA metabolic processes including DNA replication, repair, and recombination. RPA is a heterotrimeric protein with six functional oligosaccharide/oligonucleotide (OB) domains and flexible linkers. Flexibility enables RPA to adopt multiple configurations andis thought to modulate its function.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Studies on the correlation between high body mass index (BMI) and extended survival among patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have been made, although findings have shown variability. Our research explored the phenomenon of the "obesity paradox" in patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma (mUC) undergoing treatment with ICIs.
Materials And Methods: We conducted a retrospective analysis of patients diagnosed with mUC who received a minimum of one cycle of ICI treatment at two medical centers in Taiwan from September 2015 to January 2023.
Molecular motors are diverse enzymes that transduce chemical energy into mechanical work and, in doing so, perform critical cellular functions such as DNA replication and transcription, DNA supercoiling, intracellular transport, and ATP synthesis. Single-molecule techniques have been extensively used to identify structural intermediates in the reaction cycles of molecular motors and to understand how substeps in energy consumption drive transitions between the intermediates. Here, we review a broad spectrum of single-molecule tools and techniques such as optical and magnetic tweezers, atomic force microscopy (AFM), single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET), nanopore tweezers, and hybrid techniques that increase the number of observables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurodegenerative diseases encompass a range of diagnoses, such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Despite decades of advancements in understanding the neurobiology of individual diseases, this class has few disease-modifying therapeutics and a paucity of biomarkers for diagnosis or progression. However, tau protein aggregation has emerged as a potential unifying factor across several neurodegenerative diseases, which has prompted a rapid growth in tau-related funding.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNon-structural protein 3 (NS3) is an essential enzyme and a therapeutic target of hepatitis C virus (HCV). Compared to NS3-catalyzed nucleic acids unwinding, its translation on single stranded nucleic acids have received relatively little attention. To investigate the NS3h translocation with single-stranded nucleic acids substrates directly, we have applied a hybrid platform of single-molecule fluorescence detection combined with optical trapping.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMethods Mol Biol
January 2018
Helicases are nucleic acid-dependent ATPases which can bind and remodel nucleic acids, protein-nucleic acid complexes, or both. They are involved in almost every step in cells related to nucleic acid metabolisms, including DNA replication and repair, transcription, RNA maturation and splicing, and nuclear export processes. Using single-molecule fluorescence-force spectroscopy, we have previously directly observed helicase translocation on long single-stranded DNA and revealed that two monomers of UvrD helicase are required for the initiation of unwinding function.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe gel assay, circular dichroism, and differential scanning calorimetry results all demonstrate that a major monomer component of bcl2mid exists at low [K(+)] and an additional dimer component appears at high [K(+)]. This implies that bcl2mid is a good candidate for elucidating the mechanisms of structural conversion between different G-quadruplexes. We further discovered that the conversion between the monomer and dimer forms of bcl2mid does not occur at room temperature but is detected when heated above the melting point.
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