Publications by authors named "Fu-kun Zhao"

Inflammation is a physiological response of the body to harmful stimuli such as pathogens, damaged cells, or irritants, involving a series of cellular and molecular events. It is associated with various diseases including neurodegenerative disorders, cancer, and atherosclerosis, and is a leading cause of global mortality. Key inflammatory factors, such as Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha (TNF-α), Interleukin-1 (IL-1), Interleukin-6 (IL-6), Monocyte Chemoattractant Protein-1 (MCP-1/CCL2), RANTES (CCL5), and prostaglandins, play central roles in inflammation and disease progression.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Nanomedicine has shown great anticancer potential by disrupting redox homeostasis and increasing the levels of oxidative stress, but the therapeutic effect is limited by factors including the intrinsic self-protection mechanism of tumors. Cancer cell death can be induced by the exploration of different cell death mechanisms, such as apoptosis, pyroptosis, necroptosis, cuproptosis, and ferroptosis. The merging of nanotechnology with biomedicine has provided tremendous opportunities to construct cell death-based nanomedicine for innovative cancer therapy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Breast cancer, with its high morbidity and mortality rates, is a significant global health burden. Traditional treatments-surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy-are widely used but come with drawbacks such as recurrence, metastasis, and significant side effects, including damage to healthy tissues. To address these limitations, new therapeutic strategies are being developed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Normal mammalian terminal erythroid differentiation is a precisely regulated process during which the progenitor cells execute particular programs to form a mature erythrocytic phenotype. In the present study, it was found that RbAp48, a histone-binding protein associated with retinoblastoma protein, was upregulated during terminal erythroid maturation and . This indicated that RbAp48, at least in part, participated in the regulation of murine erythropoiesis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Paclitaxel, one of the broadest-spectrum anticancer agents, is currently being used in the treatment of patients with solid tumors. In the present study, we compared the effect of paclitaxel on two types of leukemia cells. Our results showed that paclitaxel could inhibit the proliferation of MEL and K562 cells in a dose- and time-dependent manner.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Anoplin is a recently discovered antimicrobial peptide (AMP) isolated from the venom sac of the spider wasp Anoplius samariensis, and it is one of the shortest α-helical AMP found naturally to date consisting of only ten amino acids. Previous results showed that anoplin exhibits potent antimicrobial activity but little hemolytic activity. In this study, we synthesized anoplin, studied its cytotoxicity in Friend virus-induced leukemia cells [murine erythroleukemia (MEL) cells], and proposed its possible mechanism.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Eight-stranded β-barrel outer membrane proteins can confer bacterial virulence via resistance to host innate defenses. This resistance function of OmpW, which was recently identified as an eight-stranded β-barrel protein, was investigated in this study. Our results demonstrated that upregulation of OmpW correlated with increased bacterial survival during phagocytosis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hemokinin-1 is a peptide encoded by Pptc, which belongs to the family of mammalian tachykinins. Our previous results showed that rat/mouse hemokinin-1 (r/m HK-1) produced striking analgesia after intracerebroventricular (i.c.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most common malignancies. Early diagnosis is critical for guiding the therapeutic management of ESCC. It is imperative to find more effective biomarkers of ESCC.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The in vitro insulin unfolding had been studied using the "equilibrium unfolding" method where protein is unfolded by reducing reagents in the presence of trace amounts of oxidants such as oxidized glutathione. Nine intermediates were captured in the unfolding process, named as P1A, P2A, P3A, P4A, P3B, P4B, P5B, P6B, and P7B, which were all either A chain derivatives or B chain derivatives. No intermediate with inter-A-B chain disulfide was captured.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays a critical role in tumor progression. To obtain a broad view of the molecules involved in EMT, we carried out a comparative proteomic analysis of transforming growth factor-beta1 (TGF-beta1)-induced EMT in AML-12 murine hepatocytes. A total of 36 proteins with significant alterations in abundance were identified.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Colon cancer is one of the most common malignancies in the world. Oxaliplatin, a third-generation platinum compound, is widely used in clinical chemotherapy of colon cancer. Although the mechanisms of the antitumor effect of Oxaliplatin have been investigated in recent years, the proteomic changes that are associated with the cellular response to this compound are poorly understood.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) can induce G2/M phase-dependent apoptosis and G1/S phase-dependent epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in hepatocytes, but the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated alterations in the global proteome using two dimensional gel electrophoresis of AML-12 murine hepatocyte cells after treatment with TGF-beta at several time points after synchronization in the G2/M or G1/S phase. Upon TGF-beta treatment, the expression levels of 44 proteins were found to be significantly changed in cells synchronized in the G2/M phase.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cell-cell interactions play a crucial role during embryogenesis and are enhanced during cell aggregation. P19 mouse embryonic carcinoma cells can differentiate into neural cells by the addition of retinoic acid (RA) or by overexpression of the Wnt1 gene, with both processes dependent on cell aggregation. To identify molecules involved in the cell aggregation process, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2DE) was used to establish the cell aggregation-associated protein profiles.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Visible stain is still the most popular protein staining method used in proteomic approaches. However, most published data have been derived from comparisons between visible dyes and fluorescent dyes. In this work, we have focused on seven widely used visible staining procedures--Neuhoff CCB, blue silver, and five silver stains (LKB SN, He SN, Yan SN, Vorum SN, and Blum SN)--and studied their stain efficiencies and MALDI-TOF MS compatibilities on 1-D and 2-D PAGE.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Cellulase genes have been reported not only from fungi, bacteria and plant, but also from some invertebrate animals. Here, two cellulase (endo-beta-1,4-glucanase, EC 3.2.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Although serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) is a well-established diagnostic tool for prostate cancer (PCa) detection, the definitive diagnosis of PCa is based on the information contained in prostate needle biopsy (PNBX) specimens. To define the proteomic features of PNBX specimens to identify candidate biomarkers for PCa, PNBX specimens from patients with PCa or benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) were subjected to comparative proteomic analysis. 2-DE revealed that 52 protein spots exhibited statistically significantly changes among PCa and BPH groups.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A novel gene (Ba-ega) of Bacillus sp. AC-1, encoding an endoglucanase (Ba-EGA), was cloned and expressed in Escherichia coli. Ba-ega, containing a 1,980-bp open reading frame (ORF), encoded a protein of 659 amino acids and had a molecular mass of 74.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Two novel endo-beta-1,4-glucanases, EG45 and EG27, were isolated from the gastric juice of mollusca, Ampullaria crossean, by anion exchange, hydrophobic interaction, gel filtration and a second round of anion exchange chromatography. The purified proteins EG45 and EG27 appeared as a single band on sodium dodecylsulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis with a molecular mass of 45 kDa and 27 kDa, respectively. The optimum pH for CMC activity was 5.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Mouse embryonic carcinoma P19 cell has been used extensively as a model to study molecular mechanisms of neural differentiation in vitro. After retinoic acid (RA) treatment and aggregation, P19 cells can differentiate into neural cells including neurons and glial cells. In this study, comparative proteomic analysis is utilized to approach the protein profiles associated with the RA-induced neural differentiation of P19 cells.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The cellulase activity and stability of EGX, a multi-functional cellulase previously purified from the mollusca Ampullaria crossean, was systematically studied under different pH. The pH induced con-formation and stability change of EGX have been investigated by using the intrinsic fluorescence, ANS fluorescence and CD spectrum. It has been found that the conformation and activity of this cellulase were strongly dependent on the pH.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The proteomic profiles of a human hepatoma revertant, CL1, and its original cell line, SMMC7721, were compared by using an improved two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) procedure, with multi-IPGstrips gels (length View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To analyze differentially expressed metastasis-associated proteins in Adenoid cystic carcinoma cell lines of human salivary gland by proteomics.

Methods: Protein expression alterations of ACC-2 and ACC-M cells were described by 2-D gels. After image analysis by software, proteins of interest were excised from the gels and identified by matrix assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Metastasis is the most insidious and life threatening aspect of cancers. However little is known about the molecular mechanisms of tumor metastasis. A poorly metastatic Acc-2 cell line and highly metastatic Acc-M cell line were selected as an experimental model to study on metastatic mechanisms and antimetastatic procedures.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Transfection of cDNA in 3'untranslated region of human nuclear factor for interleukin-6 (NF-IL6 3'UTR) induced tumor suppression in a human hepatoma cell line. cDNA array analysis was used to reveal changes in gene expression profile leading to tumor suppression The results indicate that this suppression was not due to activation of dsRNA-dependent protein kinase, nor to inactivation of oncogenes; rather, all the changes in expression of known genes, induced by NF-IL6 3'UTR cDNA may be ascribed to the suppression of cellular malignancy. Therefore, our results imply that this 3'untranslated region may have played role of a regulator of gene expression profile.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF