Publications by authors named "Christoph Muck"

This study assesses the current situation concerning sexual violence against women in India and women's individual coping strategies. We conducted 15 semistructured interviews with 17- to 22-year-old Indian college students. First, results about the current situation showed threatening circumstances for women and revealed how deeply sexual violence affects women's lives.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Numerous school-based prevention programs have been developed by scientists and practitioners to address sexual violence in adolescence. However, such programs struggle with two major challenges. First, the effectiveness of many well-established practitioner programs has not been rigorously evaluated.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Aging is accompanied by loss of subcutaneous adipose tissue. This may be due to reduced differentiation capacity or deficiency in DNA damage repair (DDR) factors. Here we investigated the role of SNEV, which was implicated in DDR and senescence evasion, in adipogenic differentiation of human adipose stromal cells (hASCs).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Defective DNA repair is widely acknowledged to negatively impact on healthy aging, since mutations in DNA repair factors lead to accelerated and premature aging. However, the opposite, namely if improved DNA repair will also increase the life or health span is less clear, and only few studies have tested if overexpression of DNA repair factors modulates life and health span in cells or organisms. Recently, we identified and characterized SNEVhPrp19/hPso4, a protein that plays a role in DNA repair and pre-mRNA splicing, and observed a doubling of the replicative life span upon ectopic overexpression, accompanied by lower basal DNA damage and apoptosis levels as well as an increased resistance to oxidative stress.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Insulin-like growth factor (IGF) binding protein-3 (IGFBP-3) regulates cell proliferation and survival by extracellular interaction and inactivation of the growth factor IGF-I. Beyond that, IGF-independent actions mediated by intracellular IGFBP-3 including nuclear-IGFBP-3, have also been described. We here show, using both confocal and electron microscopy and cell fractionation, that the extracellular addition of IGFBP-3 to living cells results in rapid uptake and nuclear delivery of IGFBP-3, by yet partly unknown mechanisms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Researchers investigated genetic factors involved in cellular aging using various human cell models and gathered their findings into the GiSAO database.
  • They discovered new candidate genes linked to cellular aging that were previously unassociated, along with new pathways that might influence the aging process.
  • Functional experiments confirmed several of these candidate genes, and further testing in yeast demonstrated how deleting specific genes could either shorten or extend lifespan, revealing evolutionarily conserved mechanisms of aging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Tumor necrosis factor-like cytokine 1A (TL1A) is expressed in endothelial cells and contributes to T-cell activation, via an extracellular fragment TL1A(L72-L251), generated by ectodomain shedding. Fragments of TL1A, referred to as vascular endothelial growth inhibitor, were found to induce growth arrest and apoptosis in endothelial cells; however, the underlying mechanisms remained obscure. Here, we show that full-length TL1A is the major detectable gene product in both human umbilical vein endothelial cells and circulating endothelial progenitor cells.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Yeast mother cell-specific aging constitutes a model of replicative aging as it occurs in stem cell populations of higher eukaryotes. Here, we present a new long-lived yeast deletion mutation,afo1 (for aging factor one), that confers a 60% increase in replicative lifespan. AFO1/MRPL25 codes for a protein that is contained in the large subunit of the mitochondrial ribosome.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Aging is a complex process involving body function decline due to random damage, but it has genetic repair mechanisms that may help mitigate these effects.
  • Recent research has focused on miRNAs, small molecules that can regulate the expression of numerous genes and are believed to play a role in physiological processes, including aging.
  • The study identified four specific miRNAs that are consistently down-regulated in various aging cell models, linking their decrease to higher levels of certain target genes associated with aging, particularly the cdk inhibitor p21/CDKN1A.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Whereas insulin-like growth factor binding protein-3 (IGFBP-3) is frequently upregulated in senescent replicatively exhausted human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC), a systematic analysis of four different HUVEC donors revealed that IGFBP-3 is not consistently upregulated in all isolates at senescence. Lentiviral overexpression of IGFBP-3 inhibited cell proliferation, induced apoptosis and senescence in young HUVEC. Knockdown of IGFBP-3 in senescent HUVEC by lentivirally expressed shRNA did not revert but rather enforced senescence-associated beta-galactosidase staining and apoptosis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF