Ezrin Inhibition Overcomes Acquired Resistance to Vemurafenib in BRAFV600E-Mutated Colon Cancer and Melanoma Cells In Vitro.

Despite the advancements in targeted therapy for BRAFV600E-mutated metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC), the development of resistance to BRAFV600E inhibition limits the response rate and durability of the treatment. Better understanding of the resistance mechanisms to BRAF inhibitors will facilitate the design of novel pharmacological strategies for BRAF-mutated mCRC. The aim of this study was to identify novel protein candidates involved in acquired resistance to BRAFV600E inhibitor vemurafenib in BRAFV600E-mutated colon cancer cells using an integrated proteomics approach.

Engineering of increased L-Threonine production in bacteria by combinatorial cloning and machine learning.

The goal of this study is to develop a general strategy for bacterial engineering using an integrated synthetic biology and machine learning (ML) approach. This strategy was developed in the context of increasing L-threonine production in ATCC 21277. A set of 16 genes was initially selected based on metabolic pathway relevance to threonine biosynthesis and used for combinatorial cloning to construct a set of 385 strains to generate training data (i.

Exploring Toxin Genes of Myanmar Russell's Viper, , through De Novo Venom Gland Transcriptomics.

The Russell's viper () is a medically important venomous snake in Myanmar. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) shows potential to investigate the venom complexity, giving deeper insights into snakebite pathogenesis and possible drug discoveries. mRNA from venom gland tissue was extracted and sequenced on the Illumina HiSeq platform and de novo assembled by Trinity.

RNA-Sequencing of Snake Venom Glands.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS), particularly RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) technique, allows detection and quantification of different RNA transcripts in a tissue sample, and in our case toxin transcripts from snake venom glands. Using this approach, novel toxin transcripts can be detected and abundancies of different isoforms of each toxin measured. The analytical pipeline can be briefly outlined as follows.

Is there a Function for a Sex Pheromone Precursor?

Functional coupling and comparative genomics analysis have been applied to study functional associations of orthologs of enterococcal cAD1 sex pheromone (P13268) known to be responsible for biofilm formation, conjugative plasmid transfer and spreading of bacterial antibiotics resistance. cAD1 peptide pheromone is released from the membrane lipoprotein with the peptide precursor encoded by a gene cad (tr|C2JQE7). Our analysis of genomic neighbourhood of cad and motifs of the encoded polypeptide and its orthologs suggests a close functional association between cAD1 and ApbE protein (Q82Z24), a FMN insertion and trafficking facilitator.