Publications by authors named "Nikoleta Vavouraki"

This study reports on biallelic homozygous and monoallelic variants in in three unrelated families presenting with epileptic encephalopathy associated with a broad neurological involvement characterized by microcephaly, intellectual disability, seizures, and global developmental delay. encodes for a transmembrane protein that is involved in controlling neurite outgrowth and inhibitory synapse development and that has an important role in brain function and neurological diseases. Using primary cultures of hippocampal neurons carrying patients' SLITRK3 variants and in combination with electrophysiology, we demonstrate that recessive variants are loss-of-function alleles.

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Mutations in LRRK2 are the most common genetic cause of Parkinson's disease. Despite substantial research efforts, the physiological and pathological role of this multidomain protein remains poorly defined. In this study, we used a systematic approach to construct the general protein-protein interactome around LRRK2, which was then evaluated taking into consideration the differential expression patterns and the co-expression behaviours of the LRRK2 interactors in 15 different healthy tissue types.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Mutations in the SPG11 gene, which encodes the protein spatacsin, are the main cause of a genetic condition called Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), characterized by thinning of the brain's corpus callosum.
  • - Previous research indicated that spatacsin is crucial for cellular transport processes, and its malfunction leads to issues with lysosomal and axonal transport.
  • - The study reveals that spatacsin interacts with a specific group of 14-3-3 proteins, and this interaction is influenced by the phosphorylation of spatacsin through Protein Kinase A (PKA), which regulates its movement within cells.
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The Hereditary Spastic Paraplegias are a group of neurodegenerative diseases characterized by spasticity and weakness in the lower body. Owing to the combination of genetic diversity and variable clinical presentation, the Hereditary Spastic Paraplegias are a strong candidate for protein-protein interaction network analysis as a tool to understand disease mechanism(s) and to aid functional stratification of phenotypes. In this study, experimentally validated human data were used to create a protein-protein interaction network based on the causative genes.

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Background: The past decade has seen the rise of omics data for the understanding of biological systems in health and disease. This wealth of information includes protein-protein interaction (PPI) data derived from both low- and high-throughput assays, which are curated into multiple databases that capture the extent of available information from the peer-reviewed literature. Although these curation efforts are extremely useful, reliably downloading and integrating PPI data from the variety of available repositories is challenging and time consuming.

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