Publications by authors named "Cortazar A"

Absent in melanoma 2 (AIM2) is a cytosolic dsDNA sensor that has been broadly studied for its role in inflammasome assembly. However, little is known about the function of AIM2 in adaptive immune cells. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether AIM2 has a cell-intrinsic role in CD4 T cell differentiation or function.

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The fast dynamics and reversibility of posttranslational modifications by the ubiquitin family pose significant challenges for research. Here we present SUMO-ID, a technology that merges proximity biotinylation by TurboID and protein-fragment complementation to find SUMO-dependent interactors of proteins of interest. We develop an optimized split-TurboID version and show SUMO interaction-dependent labelling of proteins proximal to PML and RANGAP1.

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Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most prevalent cancers in men. Androgen receptor signaling plays a major role in this disease, and androgen deprivation therapy is a common therapeutic strategy in recurrent disease. Sphingolipid metabolism plays a central role in cell death, survival, and therapy resistance in cancer.

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Operational tolerance after kidney transplantation is defined as stable graft acceptance without the need for immunosuppression therapy. However, it is not clear which cellular and molecular pathways are driving tolerance in these patients. We performed genome-wide analysis of DNA methylation in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from kidney transplant recipients with chronic rejection and operational tolerance from the Genetic Analysis of Molecular Biomarkers of Immunological Tolerance (GAMBIT) study.

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Extracellular vesicles (EVs) mediate cell-to-cell crosstalk whose content can induce changes in acceptor cells and their microenvironment. MLP29 cells are mouse liver progenitor cells that release EVs loaded with signaling cues that could affect cell fate. In the current work, we incubated 3T3-L1 mouse fibroblasts with MLP29-derived EVs, and then analyzed changes by proteomics and transcriptomics.

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Lyme carditis is an extracutaneous manifestation of Lyme disease characterized by episodes of atrioventricular block of varying degrees and additional, less reported cardiomyopathies. The molecular changes associated with the response to Borrelia burgdorferi over the course of infection are poorly understood. Here, we identify broad transcriptomic and proteomic changes in the heart during infection that reveal a profound down-regulation of mitochondrial components.

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Prostate cancer is the most frequent malignancy in European men and the second worldwide. One of the major oncogenic events in this disease includes amplification of the transcription factor cMYC. Amplification of this oncogene in chromosome 8q24 occurs concomitantly with the copy number increase in a subset of neighboring genes and regulatory elements, but their contribution to disease pathogenesis is poorly understood.

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Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments to take exceptional measures to minimize its spread, imposing lockdown policies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of lockdown on type 1 diabetes (T1D) glycemic control.

Material And Methods: People with T1D using flash glucose monitoring were included.

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Background: Pericytes regulate vessel stabilization and function, and their loss is associated with diseases such as diabetic retinopathy or cancer. Despite their physiological importance, pericyte function and molecular regulation during angiogenesis remain poorly understood.

Methods: To decipher the transcriptomic programs of pericytes during angiogenesis, we crossed mice into RiboTag mice.

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Article Synopsis
  • * A study utilizing NMR-based metabolomics analyzed over 650 urine samples from PC and benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) patients, revealing limited differences in overall urine composition but significant changes in specific metabolites.
  • * Key findings indicated that altered metabolites in PC patients suggest a reduction in nitrogen and carbon waste, pointing to a metabolic shift that enhances resources for cancer cell growth through pathways like glycolysis and the urea cycle.
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Gene dosage is a key defining factor to understand cancer pathogenesis and progression, which requires the development of experimental models that aid better deconstruction of the disease. Here, we model an aggressive form of prostate cancer and show the unconventional association of LKB1 dosage to prostate tumorigenesis. Whereas loss of Lkb1 alone in the murine prostate epithelium was inconsequential for tumorigenesis, its combination with an oncogenic insult, illustrated by Pten heterozygosity, elicited lethal metastatic prostate cancer.

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The PPARγ coactivator 1 alpha (PGC1α) is a prostate tumor suppressor that controls the balance between anabolism and catabolism. PGC1A downregulation in prostate cancer is causally associated with the development of metastasis. Here we show that the transcriptional complex formed by PGC1α and estrogen-related receptor 1 alpha (ERRα) controls the aggressive properties of prostate cancer cells.

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Oncogene addiction postulates that the survival and growth of certain tumor cells is dependent upon the activity of one oncogene, despite their multiple genetic and epigenetic abnormalities. This phenomenon provides a foundation for molecular targeted therapy and a rationale for oncogene-based stratification. We have previously reported that the Promyelocytic Leukemia protein (PML) is upregulated in triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) and it regulates cancer-initiating cell function, thus suggesting that this protein can be therapeutically targeted in combination with PML-based stratification.

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The dysregulation of gene expression is an enabling hallmark of cancer. Computational analysis of transcriptomics data from human cancer specimens, complemented with exhaustive clinical annotation, provides an opportunity to identify core regulators of the tumorigenic process. Here we exploit well-annotated clinical datasets of prostate cancer for the discovery of transcriptional regulators relevant to prostate cancer.

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With the advent of OMICs technologies, both individual research groups and consortia have spear-headed the characterization of human samples of multiple pathophysiologic origins, resulting in thousands of archived genomes and transcriptomes. Although a variety of web tools are now available to extract information from OMICs data, their utility has been limited by the capacity of nonbioinformatician researchers to exploit the information. To address this problem, we have developed CANCERTOOL, a web-based interface that aims to overcome the major limitations of public transcriptomics dataset analysis for highly prevalent types of cancer (breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal).

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: The outcome for oestrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer patients has improved greatly in recent years largely due to targeted therapy. However, the presence of involved multiple synchronous lymph nodes remains associated with a poor outcome. Consequently, these patients would benefit from the identification of new prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets.

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Summary: Genes sharing functions, expression patterns or quantitative traits are not randomly distributed along eukaryotic genomes. In order to study the distribution of genes that share a given feature, we present Cluster Locator, an online analysis and visualization tool. Cluster Locator determines the number, size and position of all the clusters formed by the protein-coding genes on a list according to a given maximum gap, the percentage of gene clustering of the list and its statistical significance.

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Prostate cancer is diagnosed late in life, when co-morbidities are frequent. Among them, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes or metabolic syndrome exhibit an elevated incidence. In turn, prostate cancer patients frequently undergo chronic pharmacological treatments that could alter disease initiation, progression and therapy response.

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The nuclear receptor PPAR-β/δ (PPARD) has essential roles in fatty acid catabolism and energy homeostasis as well as cell differentiation, inflammation, and metabolism. However, its contributions to tumorigenesis are uncertain and have been disputed. Here, we provide evidence of tumor suppressive activity of PPARD in prostate cancer through a noncanonical and ligand-independent pathway.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on how the mTORC1 pathway plays a crucial role in cancer cell growth by regulating polyamine dynamics, which are vital for tumor development.
  • Researchers used metabolomics on mouse models and human prostate cancer biopsies, discovering that mTORC1 alters the production of key metabolites like dcSAM and affects the stability of the enzyme AMD1.
  • Findings show that high AMD1 levels correlate with active mTORC1 in human prostate cancer, while patients treated with the mTORC1 inhibitor everolimus experienced reduced AMD1 levels and cell proliferation, highlighting mTORC1's role in oncogenic metabolism.
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Unlabelled: Based on the current tools, de novo secretome (full set of proteins secreted by an organism) prediction is a time consuming bioinformatic task that requires a multifactorial analysis in order to obtain reliable in silico predictions. Hence, to accelerate this process and offer researchers a reliable repository where secretome information can be obtained for vertebrates and model organisms, we have developed VerSeDa (Vertebrate Secretome Database). This freely available database stores information about proteins that are predicted to be secreted through the classical and non-classical mechanisms, for the wide range of vertebrate species deposited at the NCBI, UCSC and ENSEMBL sites.

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