Antimicrob Agents Chemother
November 2024
The emergence of poses a significant health challenge that has led to a new era of multidrug-resistant fungal infections. Invasive infections caused by are usually associated with remarkable morbidity and mortality. For many years, amphotericin B (AmB) remained the most efficient and the last line of treatment against most hard-to-treat fungal infections.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAngiosarcoma is a vascular sarcoma that is highly aggressive and metastatic. Because of its rarity, treatment options for patients are limited. Therefore, more research is needed to identify possible therapeutic vulnerabilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe genus Clostridium is a large and diverse group within the Bacillota (formerly Firmicutes), whose members can encode useful complex traits such as solvent production, gas-fermentation, and lignocellulose breakdown. We describe 270 genome sequences of solventogenic clostridia from a comprehensive industrial strain collection assembled by Professor David Jones that includes 194 C. beijerinckii, 57 C.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFhas emerged as a problematic fungal pathogen associated with high morbidity and mortality. Amphotericin B (AmB) is the most effective antifungal used to treat invasive fungal candidiasis, with resistance rarely observed among clinical isolates. However, possesses extraordinary resistant profiles against all available antifungal drugs, including AmB.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFolate receptors can perform folate transport, cell adhesion, and/or transcription factor functions. The beta isoform of the folate receptor (FRβ) has attracted considerable attention as a biomarker for immunosuppressive macrophages and myeloid-derived suppressor cells, however, its role in immunosuppression remains uncharacterized. We demonstrate here that FRβ cannot bind folate on healthy tissue macrophages, but does bind folate after macrophage incubation in anti-inflammatory cytokines or cancer cell-conditioned media.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAngiosarcoma (AS) is a vascular sarcoma that is highly aggressive and metastatic. Due to its rarity, treatment options for patients are limited, therefore more research is needed to identify possible therapeutic vulnerabilities. We previously found that conditional deletion of drives AS development in mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPet dogs develop spontaneous cancers at a rate estimated to be five times higher than that of humans, providing a unique opportunity to study disease biology and evaluate novel therapeutic strategies in a model system that possesses an intact immune system and mirrors key aspects of human cancer biology. Despite decades of interest, effective utilization of pet dog cancers has been hindered by a limited repertoire of necessary cellular and molecular reagents for both in vitro and in vivo studies, as well as a dearth of information regarding the genomic landscape of these cancers. Recently, many of these critical gaps have been addressed through the generation of a highly annotated canine reference genome, the creation of several tools necessary for multi-omic analysis of canine tumours, and the development of a centralized repository for key genomic and associated clinical information from canine cancer patients, the Integrated Canine Data Commons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFis a model gas-fermenting acetogen for commercial ethanol production. It is also a platform organism being developed for the carbon-negative production of acetone and isopropanol by gas fermentation. We have assembled a 5.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Polo-like kinase 1 (Plk1) plays an important role in cell-cycle regulation. Recent work has suggested that Plk1 could be a biomarker of gemcitabine response in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Although targeting Plk1 to treat PDAC has been attempted in clinical trials, the results were not promising, and the mechanisms of resistance to Plk1 inhibition is poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProstate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among men in the United States. The androgen receptor (AR) antagonist enzalutamide is an FDA-approved drug for treatment of patients with late-stage prostate cancer and is currently under clinical study for early-stage prostate cancer treatment. After a short positive response period to enzalutamide, tumors will develop drug resistance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA pancreatic acinus is a functional unit of the exocrine pancreas producing digest enzymes. Its pathobiology is crucial to pancreatic diseases including pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer, which can initiate from pancreatic acini. However, research on pancreatic acini has been significantly hampered due to the difficulty of culturing normal acinar cells .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Improved therapies are needed for patients with invasive urothelial carcinoma (InvUC). Tailoring treatment to molecular subtypes holds promise, but requires further study, including studies in pre-clinical animal models. Naturally-occurring canine InvUC harbors luminal and basal subtypes, mimicking those observed in humans, and could offer a relevant model for the disease in people.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBRAF-targeted therapies including vemurafenib (Zelboraf) induce dramatic cancer remission; however, drug resistance commonly emerges. The purpose was to characterize a naturally occurring canine cancer model harboring complex features of human cancer, to complement experimental models to improve BRAF-targeted therapy. A phase I/II clinical trial of vemurafenib was performed in pet dogs with naturally occurring invasive urothelial carcinoma (InvUC) harboring the canine homologue of human The safety, MTD, pharmacokinetics, and antitumor activity were determined.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe soil bacterium Burkholderia gladioli GSRB05 produces the natural compound arsinothricin [2-amino-4-(hydroxymethylarsinoyl) butanoate] (AST), which has been demonstrated to be a broad-spectrum antibiotic. To identify the genes responsible for AST biosynthesis, a draft genome sequence of GSRB05 was constructed. Three genes, , in an arsenic resistance operon were found to be a biosynthetic gene cluster responsible for synthesis of AST and its precursor, hydroxyarsinothricin [2-amino-4-(dihydroxyarsinoyl) butanoate] (AST-OH).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSwitch/sucrose-nonfermentable (SWI/SNF) chromatin-remodeling complexes are critical regulators of chromatin dynamics during transcription, DNA replication, and DNA repair. A recently identified SWI/SNF subcomplex termed GLTSCR1/1L-BAF (GBAF; or "noncanonical BAF", ncBAF) uniquely contains bromodomain-containing protein BRD9 and glioma tumor suppressor candidate region 1 (GLTSCR1) or its paralog GLTSCR1-like (GLTSCR1L). Recent studies have identified a unique dependency on GBAF (ncBAF) complexes in synovial sarcoma and malignant rhabdoid tumors, both of which possess aberrations in canonical BAF (cBAF) and Polybromo-BAF (PBAF) complexes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDEAD-box helicase 5 (DDX5) is a founding member of the DEAD-box RNA helicase family, a group of enzymes that regulate ribonucleoprotein formation and function in every aspect of RNA metabolism, ranging from synthesis to decay. Our laboratory previously found that DDX5 is involved in energy homeostasis, a process that is altered in many cancers. Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is an understudied cancer type for which effective treatments are currently unavailable.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn aberrant increase in pluripotency gene (PpG) expression due to enhancer reactivation could induce stemness and enhance the tumorigenicity of cancer stem cells. Silencing of PpG enhancers (PpGe) during embryonic stem cell differentiation involves Lsd1-mediated H3K4me1 demethylation and DNA methylation. Here, we observed retention of H3K4me1 and DNA hypomethylation at PpGe associated with a partial repression of PpGs in F9 embryonal carcinoma cells (ECCs) post-differentiation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral members of the family produce juglone, a specialized 1,4-naphthoquinone (1,4-NQ) natural product that is responsible for the notorious allelopathic effects of black walnut (). Despite its documented ecological roles and potential for being developed as a novel natural product-based herbicide, none of the genes involved in synthesizing juglone have been identified. Based on classical labeling studies, we hypothesized that biosynthesis of juglone's naphthalenoid moiety is shared with biochemical steps of the phylloquinone pathway.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiotechnol Biofuels
September 2017
Background: is an anaerobic, mesophilic, cellulolytic, cellulosome-producing clostridial bacterium capable of utilizing cellulose and cellobiose as carbon sources. Recently, we sequenced the genome, and subsequent comprehensive bioinformatic analysis, herein reported, revealed an unprecedented number of cellulosome-related components, including 78 cohesin modules scattered among 31 scaffoldins and more than 200 dockerin-bearing ORFs. In terms of numbers, the cellulosome system represents the most intricate, compositionally diverse cellulosome system yet known in nature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study characterized regions of DNA which remained unassembled by either PacBio and Illumina sequencing technologies for seven bacterial genomes. Two genomes were manually finished using bioinformatics and PCR/Sanger sequencing approaches and regions not assembled by automated software were analyzed. Gaps present within Illumina assemblies mostly correspond to repetitive DNA regions such as multiple rRNA operon sequences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFZymomonas mobilis is a natural ethanologen with many desirable industrial biocatalyst characteristics. In this review, we will discuss work to develop Z. mobilis as a model system for biofuel production from the perspectives of substrate utilization, development for industrial robustness, potential product spectrum, strain evaluation and fermentation strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe and others have shown the utility of long sequence reads to improve genome assembly quality. In this study, we generated PacBio DNA sequence data to improve the assemblies of draft genomes for Clostridium thermocellum AD2, Clostridium thermocellum LQRI, and Pelosinus fermentans R7.
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