Early detection and surgical excision of tumors have helped improve the survival rate of patients with breast cancer. However, patients with metastatic cancer typically have a poor prognosis. In this study, we propose that ANKRD1 promotes metastasis of breast cancer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrief Funct Genomics
January 2025
The 5-year survival rate of kidney cancer drops dramatically from 93% to 15% when it is metastatic. Metastasis constitutes for 30% of kidney cancer cases, in which clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is the most prominent subtype. By sequencing mRNA of ccRCC patient samples, we found that apolipoprotein L1 (APOL1) was highly expressed in tumors compared to their adjacent normal tissues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe impact of synonymous codon choice on protein output has important implications for understanding endogenous gene expression and design of synthetic mRNAs. Synonymous codons are decoded at different speeds, but simple models predict that this should not drive protein output. Instead, translation initiation should be the rate limiting step for production of protein per mRNA, with little impact of codon choice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCatecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT) is an inherited genetic disorder that predisposes patients to potentially fatal arrhythmia when under physical or emotional stress. Anesthetic management of patients with CPVT poses a huge challenge as physical and emotional stressors are common in the operating room. Stressors, such as pain and anxiety, must be carefully controlled to prevent life-threatening tachyarrhythmias.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInflammatory breast cancer (IBC), the most aggressive breast cancer subtype, is driven by an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). Current treatments for IBC have limited efficacy. In a clinical trial (NCT01036087), an anti-EGFR antibody combined with neoadjuvant chemotherapy produced the highest pathological complete response rate ever reported in patients with IBC having triple-negative receptor status.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study used k-mer embeddings as effective feature to identify DNA N6-Methyladenine sites in plant genomes and obtained improved performance without substantial effort in feature extraction, combination and selection. Identification of DNA N6-methyladenine sites has been a very active topic of computational biology due to the unavailability of suitable methods to identify them accurately, especially in plants. Substantial results were obtained with a great effort put in extracting, heuristic searching, or fusing a diverse types of features, not to mention a feature selection step.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUp-regulation of thrombospondin-4 (TSP4) or voltage-gated calcium channel subunit αδ (Caαδ) proteins in the spinal cord contributes to neuropathic pain development through an unidentified mechanism. We have previously shown that TSP4 interacts with Caαδ to promote excitatory synaptogenesis and the development of chronic pain states. However, the TSP4 determinants responsible for these changes are not known.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLoss of high-voltage-activated (HVA) calcium current (ICa) and gain of low-voltage-activated (LVA) ICa after painful peripheral nerve injury cause elevated excitability in sensory neurons. Nerve injury is also accompanied by increased expression of the extracellular matrix glycoprotein thrombospondin-4 (TSP4), and interruption of TSP4 function can reverse or prevent behavioral hypersensitivity after injury. We therefore investigated TSP4 regulation of ICa in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrigeminal nerves collecting sensory information from the orofacial area synapse on second-order neurons in the dorsal horn of subnucleus caudalis and cervical C1/C2 spinal cord (Vc/C2, or trigeminocervical complex), which is critical for sensory information processing. Injury to the trigeminal nerves may cause maladaptive changes in synaptic connectivity that plays an important role in chronic pain development. Here we examined whether injury to the infraorbital nerve, a branch of the trigeminal nerves, led to synaptic ultrastructural changes when the injured animals have developed neuropathic pain states.
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