Unveiling the Potential of Extracellular Vesicles as Biomarkers and Therapeutic Nanotools for Gastrointestinal Diseases.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs), acting as inherent nanocarriers adept at transporting a range of different biological molecules such as proteins, lipids, and genetic material, exhibit diverse functions within the gastroenteric tract. In states of normal health, they participate in the upkeep of systemic and organ homeostasis. Conversely, in pathological conditions, they significantly contribute to the pathogenesis of gastrointestinal diseases (GIDs).

Targeting the Gut: A Systematic Review of Specific Drug Nanocarriers.

The intestine is essential for the modulation of nutrient absorption and the removal of waste. Gut pathologies, such as cancer, inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and celiac disease, which extensively impact gut functions, are thus critical for human health. Targeted drug delivery is essential to tackle these diseases, improve therapy efficacy, and minimize side effects.

Multi-disciplinary Insights from the First European Forum on Visceral Myopathy 2022 Meeting.

Visceral myopathy is a rare, life-threatening disease linked to identified genetic mutations in 60% of cases. Mostly due to the dearth of knowledge regarding its pathogenesis, effective treatments are lacking. The disease is most commonly diagnosed in children with recurrent or persistent disabling episodes of functional intestinal obstruction, which can be life threatening, often requiring long-term parenteral or specialized enteral nutritional support.

The Impact of Experimental Conditions on Cell Mechanics as Measured with Nanoindentation.

The evaluation of cell elasticity is becoming increasingly significant, since it is now known that it impacts physiological mechanisms, such as stem cell differentiation and embryogenesis, as well as pathological processes, such as cancer invasiveness and endothelial senescence. However, the results of single-cell mechanical measurements vary considerably, not only due to systematic instrumental errors but also due to the dynamic and non-homogenous nature of the sample. In this work, relying on Chiaro nanoindenter (Optics11Life), we characterized in depth the nanoindentation experimental procedure, in order to highlight whether and how experimental conditions could affect measurements of living cell stiffness.

Patient's dermal fibroblasts as disease markers for visceral myopathy.

Visceral myopathy (VSCM) is a rare genetic disease, orphan of pharmacological therapy. VSCM diagnosis is not always straightforward due to symptomatology similarities with mitochondrial or neuronal forms of intestinal pseudo-obstruction. The most prevalent form of VSCM is associates with variants in the gene ACTG2, encoding the protein gamma-2 actin.

Exploration of Tools for the Interpretation of Human Non-Coding Variants.

The advent of Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) broadened the genetic variation detection range, revealing the presence of variants even in non-coding regions of the genome, which would have been missed using targeted approaches. One of the most challenging issues in WGS analysis regards the interpretation of annotated variants. This review focuses on tools suitable for the functional annotation of variants falling into non-coding regions.

Innovative Quantitative Assessment of Hand Function in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

Background: Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) compromises fine sensorimotor function during activities of daily living and affects a large number of individuals with high burden costs for society. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively characterize fine movement skills in CTS patients preoperatively and at 1 month postoperatively by means of a sensor-engineered glove, in order to provide new insights for evaluative and finally therapeutic purposes.

Methods: Forty-one CTS patients and 41 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HC) were analyzed by adopting the engineered glove Hand Test System (HTS), which previously demonstrated its reliability and sensitivity to detect hands dysfunction in several neurological diseases.

Characteristics and Applications of Technology-Aided Hand Functional Assessment: A Systematic Review.

Technology-aided hand functional assessment has received considerable attention in recent years. Its applications are required to obtain objective, reliable, and sensitive methods for clinical decision making. This systematic review aims to investigate and discuss characteristics of technology-aided hand functional assessment and their applications, in terms of the adopted sensing technology, evaluation methods and purposes.

An Overview on Microfluidic Systems for Nucleic Acids Extraction from Human Raw Samples.

Nucleic acid (NA) extraction is a basic step for genetic analysis, from scientific research to diagnostic and forensic applications. It aims at preparing samples for its application with biomolecular technologies such as isothermal and non-isothermal amplification, hybridization, electrophoresis, Sanger sequencing and next-generation sequencing. Multiple steps are involved in NA collection from raw samples, including cell separation from the rest of the specimen, cell lysis, NA isolation and release.

Biophysical phenotyping of mesenchymal stem cells along the osteogenic differentiation pathway.

Mesenchymal stem cells represent an important resource, for bone regenerative medicine and therapeutic applications. This review focuses on new advancements and biophysical tools which exploit different physical and chemical markers of mesenchymal stem cell populations, to finely characterize phenotype changes along their osteogenic differentiation process. Special attention is paid to recently developed label-free methods, which allow monitoring cell populations with minimal invasiveness.

Development of label-free biophysical markers in osteogenic maturation.

The spatial and temporal changes of morphological and mechanical properties of living cells reflect complex functionally-associated processes. Monitoring these modifications could provide a direct information on the cellular functional state. Here we present an integrated biophysical approach to the quantification of the morphological and mechanical phenotype of single cells along a maturation pathway.

Flow-induced mechanotransduction in skeletal cells.

Human body is subject to many and variegated mechanical stimuli, actuated in different ranges of force, frequency, and duration. The process through which cells "feel" forces and convert them into biochemical cascades is called mechanotransduction. In this review, the effects of fluid shear stress on bone cells will be presented.

Controlled single-cell cyclic compression and transcription analysis: A pilot study.

An innovative platform for the study of the molecular mechanisms at the basis of mechanotransduction has been implemented, developing an experimental approach capable of providing controlled dynamic compression stimuli and retrieving the biomolecular response with single-cell sensitivity. The system provides the ability to perform compression-release cycles on single cells with controlled forces in the nN range and a user-defined repetition rate. Experimental procedures to perform qPCR from a small set of single cells were finely tuned.

Generation of a Functional Human Neural Network by NDM29 Overexpression in Neuroblastoma Cancer Cells.

Recent advances in life sciences suggest that human and rodent cell responses to stimuli might differ significantly. In this context, the results achieved in neurotoxicology and biomedical research practices using neural networks obtained from mouse or rat primary culture of neurons would benefit of the parallel evaluation of the same parameters using fully differentiated neurons with a human genetic background, thus emphasizing the current need of neuronal cells with human origin. In this work, we developed a human functionally active neural network derived by human neuroblastoma cancer cells genetically engineered to overexpress NDM29, a non-coding RNA whose increased synthesis causes the differentiation toward a neuronal phenotype.

Osteogenic Differentiation of MSC through Calcium Signaling Activation: Transcriptomics and Functional Analysis.

The culture of progenitor mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) onto osteoconductive materials to induce a proper osteogenic differentiation and mineralized matrix regeneration represents a promising and widely diffused experimental approach for tissue-engineering (TE) applications in orthopaedics. Among modern biomaterials, calcium phosphates represent the best bone substitutes, due to their chemical features emulating the mineral phase of bone tissue. Although many studies on stem cells differentiation mechanisms have been performed involving calcium-based scaffolds, results often focus on highlighting production of in vitro bone matrix markers and in vivo tissue ingrowth, while information related to the biomolecular mechanisms involved in the early cellular calcium-mediated differentiation is not well elucidated yet.

The biophysics of piezo1 and piezo2 mechanosensitive channels.

The ability to sense mechanical stimuli and elaborate a response to them is a fundamental process in all organisms, driving crucial mechanisms ranging from cell volume regulation up to organ development or regeneration. Nevertheless, only in few cases the underlying molecular players are known. In particular, mammals possess a large variety of mechanoreceptors, providing highly specialized functions in sensory cells, but also several housekeeping molecular systems are involved in the complex mechanism of mechanotransduction.

Guidelines for managing data and processes in bone and cartilage tissue engineering.

Background: In the last decades, a wide number of researchers/clinicians involved in tissue engineering field published several works about the possibility to induce a tissue regeneration guided by the use of biomaterials. To this aim, different scaffolds have been proposed, and their effectiveness tested through in vitro and/or in vivo experiments. In this context, integration and meta-analysis approaches are gaining importance for analyses and reuse of data as, for example, those concerning the bone and cartilage biomarkers, the biomolecular factors intervening in cell differentiation and growth, the morphology and the biomechanical performance of a neo-formed tissue, and, in general, the scaffolds' ability to promote tissue regeneration.

SNPranker 2.0: a gene-centric data mining tool for diseases associated SNP prioritization in GWAS.

Background: The capability of correlating specific genotypes with human diseases is a complex issue in spite of all advantages arisen from high-throughput technologies, such as Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS). New tools for genetic variants interpretation and for Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) prioritization are actually needed. Given a list of the most relevant SNPs statistically associated to a specific pathology as result of a genotype study, a critical issue is the identification of genes that are effectively related to the disease by re-scoring the importance of the identified genetic variations.

myMIR: a genome-wide microRNA targets identification and annotation tool.

miRNA target genes prediction represents a crucial step in miRNAs functional characterization. In this context, the challenging issue remains predictions accuracy and recognition of false positive results. In this article myMIR, a web based system for increasing reliability of miRNAs predicted targets lists, is presented.

Semi-automatic identification of punching areas for tissue microarray building: the tubular breast cancer pilot study.

Background: Tissue MicroArray technology aims to perform immunohistochemical staining on hundreds of different tissue samples simultaneously. It allows faster analysis, considerably reducing costs incurred in staining. A time consuming phase of the methodology is the selection of tissue areas within paraffin blocks: no utilities have been developed for the identification of areas to be punched from the donor block and assembled in the recipient block.

A multilevel data integration resource for breast cancer study.

Background: Breast cancer is one of the most common cancer types. Due to the complexity of this disease, it is important to face its study with an integrated and multilevel approach, from genes, transcripts and proteins to molecular networks, cell populations and tissues. According to the systems biology perspective, the biological functions arise from complex networks: in this context, concepts like molecular pathways, protein-protein interactions (PPIs), mathematical models and ontologies play an important role for dissecting such complexity.

SNPRanker: a tool for identification and scoring of SNPs associated to target genes.

The identification of genes and SNPs involved in human diseases remains a challenge. Many public resources, databases and applications, collect biological data and perform annotations, increasing the global biological knowledge. The need of SNPs prioritization is emerging with the development of new high-throughput genotyping technologies, which allow to develop customized disease-oriented chips.

Ontology-based, Tissue MicroArray oriented, image centered tissue bank.

Background: Tissue MicroArray technique is becoming increasingly important in pathology for the validation of experimental data from transcriptomic analysis. This approach produces many images which need to be properly managed, if possible with an infrastructure able to support tissue sharing between institutes. Moreover, the available frameworks oriented to Tissue MicroArray provide good storage for clinical patient, sample treatment and block construction information, but their utility is limited by the lack of data integration with biomolecular information.

Tissue MicroArray: a distributed Grid approach for image analysis.

The Tissue MicroArray (TMA) technique is assuming even more importance. Digital images acquisition becomes fundamental to provide an automatic system for subsequent analysis. The accuracy of the results depends on the image resolution, which has to be very high in order to provide as many details as possible.

A Grid-based solution for management and analysis of microarrays in distributed experiments.

Several systems have been presented in the last years in order to manage the complexity of large microarray experiments. Although good results have been achieved, most systems tend to lack in one or more fields. A Grid based approach may provide a shared, standardized and reliable solution for storage and analysis of biological data, in order to maximize the results of experimental efforts.