Publications by authors named "Heike Wessendorf"
Article Synopsis
- Aberrant activity of Matriptase-1, a protease linked to various cancers, is often due to an imbalance with its inhibitor Hai1, leading to tumor development.
- Loss of the Hai1 inhibitor in zebrafish leads to early pre-neoplasms, illustrating the importance of Matriptase regulation during embryonic development.
- Epithelial polarity defects and systemic hypotonic stress were found to synergistically increase Matriptase activity, suggesting these factors could play a critical role in carcinogenesis and highlight the complexity of cancer development pathways.
We have previously shown that the Kunitz-type serine protease inhibitor Spint1a, also named Hai1a, is required in the zebrafish embryonic epidermis to restrict the activity of the type II transmembrane serine protease (TTSP) Matriptase1a/St14a, thereby ensuring epidermal homeostasis. A closely related Kunitz-type inhibitor is Spint2/Hai2, which in mammals plays multiple developmental roles that are either redundant or non-redundant with those of Spint1. However, the molecular bases for these non-redundancies are not fully understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAged epidermis is less proliferative than young, as exemplified by slower wound healing. However, it is not known whether quantitative and/or qualitative alterations in the stem and/or transit-amplifying (TA) compartments are responsible for the decreased proliferation. Earlier studies found a normal or decreased frequency of putative epidermal stem cells (EpiSCs) with aging.
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