Determination of urinary retinol and creatinine as an early sensitive marker of renal dysfunction.

Determination of urinary retinol, which is a new promising early biomarker of renal damage typically expressed in the clinical environment as retinol/creatinine ratio, is currently difficult to accomplish. We have developed and validated the new ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography method with UV and mass spectrometry detection for the separation and quantification of retinol and creatinine in human urine in a single run. The separation of these two substances with completely different physicochemical properties was achieved using a column packed with fluorinated stationary phase and acetonitrile and aqueous ammonium formate buffer as the mobile phases.

Extracellular adenosine mediates a systemic metabolic switch during immune response.

Immune defense is energetically costly, and thus an effective response requires metabolic adaptation of the organism to reallocate energy from storage, growth, and development towards the immune system. We employ the natural infection of Drosophila with a parasitoid wasp to study energy regulation during immune response. To combat the invasion, the host must produce specialized immune cells (lamellocytes) that destroy the parasitoid egg.

Casein kinase I epsilon somatic mutations found in breast cancer cause overgrowth in Drosophila.

We are using a candidate gene approach to identify genes contributing to cancer through somatic mutation. Somatic mutations were found in breast cancer samples in the human casein kinase I epsilon (CKIepsilon) gene, a homolog of the Drosophila gene dco in which certain point mutations lead to imaginal disc overgrowth. We therefore created fly genotypes in which the dco gene carried point mutations homologous to those discovered in CKIepsilon, and tested them in vivo.