Autophagy: An Emerging Target for Developing Effective Analgesics.

Inadequate treatment of acute and chronic pain causes depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and increased mortality. Abuse and overdose of opioids and the side effects associated with chronic use of NSAID illustrate the need for development of safer and effective pain medication. Working toward this end, an tool based on an emergent intelligence analytical platform that examines interactions between protein networks was used to identify molecular mechanisms involved in regulating the body's response to painful stimuli and drug treatments.

Ionizing radiation and restriction enzymes induce microhomology-mediated illegitimate recombination in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

DNA double-strand breaks can be repaired by illegitimate recombination without extended sequence homology. A distinct mechanism namely microhomology-mediated recombination occurs between a few basepairs of homology that is associated with deletions. Ionizing radiation and restriction enzymes have been shown to increase the frequency of nonhomologous integration in yeast.

Promoter-trapping in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by radiation-assisted fragment insertion.

Non-homologous insertion (NHI) of DNA fragments into genomic DNA is a method widely used in insertional mutagenesis screens. In the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the efficiency of NHI is very low. Here we report that its efficiency can be increased by gamma-irradiation of recipient cells at the time of transformation.