Loss of Roundabout Guidance Receptor 2 (Robo2) in Podocytes Protects Adult Mice from Glomerular Injury by Maintaining Podocyte Foot Process Structure.

Roundabout guidance receptor 2 (ROBO2) plays an important role during early kidney development. ROBO2 is expressed in podocytes, inhibits nephrin-induced actin polymerization, down-regulates nonmuscle myosin IIA activity, and destabilizes kidney podocyte adhesion. However, the role of ROBO2 during kidney injury, particularly in mature podocytes, is not known.

Bone Morphogenetic Protein 9 Is a Mechanistic Biomarker of Portopulmonary Hypertension.

Rationale: BMP9 (bone morphogenetic protein 9) is a circulating endothelial quiescence factor with protective effects in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). Loss-of-function mutations in BMP9, its receptors, and downstream effectors have been reported in heritable PAH.

Objectives: To determine how an acquired deficiency of BMP9 signaling might contribute to PAH.

HD CAGnome: a search tool for huntingtin CAG repeat length-correlated genes.

Background: The length of the huntingtin (HTT) CAG repeat is strongly correlated with both age at onset of Huntington's disease (HD) symptoms and age at death of HD patients. Dichotomous analysis comparing HD to controls is widely used to study the effects of HTT CAG repeat expansion. However, a potentially more powerful approach is a continuous analysis strategy that takes advantage of all of the different CAG lengths, to capture effects that are expected to be critical to HD pathogenesis.

Expressomal approach for comprehensive analysis and visualization of ligand sensitivities of xenoestrogen responsive genes.

Although biological effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are often observed at unexpectedly low doses with occasional nonmonotonic dose-response characteristics, transcriptome-wide profiles of sensitivities or dose-dependent behaviors of the EDC responsive genes have remained unexplored. Here, we describe expressome analysis for the comprehensive examination of dose-dependent gene responses and its applications to characterize estrogen responsive genes in MCF-7 cells. Transcriptomes of MCF-7 cells exposed to varying concentrations of representative natural and xenobiotic estrogens for 48 h were determined by microarray and used for computational calculation of interpolated approximations of estimated transcriptomes for 300 doses uniformly distributed in log space for each chemical.

Dominant effects of the Huntington's disease HTT CAG repeat length are captured in gene-expression data sets by a continuous analysis mathematical modeling strategy.

In Huntington's disease (HD), the size of the expanded HTT CAG repeat mutation is the primary driver of the processes that determine age at onset of motor symptoms. However, correlation of cellular biochemical parameters also extends across the normal repeat range, supporting the view that the CAG repeat represents a functional polymorphism with dominant effects determined by the longer allele. A central challenge to defining the functional consequences of this single polymorphism is the difficulty of distinguishing its subtle effects from the multitude of other sources of biological variation.