The retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), a monolayer of post-mitotic polarized epithelial cells, strategically situated between the photoreceptors and the choroid, is the primary caretaker of photoreceptor health and function. Dysfunction of the RPE underlies many inherited and acquired diseases that cause permanent blindness. Decades of research have yielded valuable insight into the cell biology of the RPE. In recent years, new technologies such as live-cell imaging have resulted in major advancement in our understanding of areas such as the daily phagocytosis and clearance of photoreceptor outer segment tips, autophagy, endolysosome function, and the metabolic interplay between the RPE and photoreceptors. In this review, we aim to integrate these studies with an emphasis on appropriate models and techniques to investigate RPE cell biology and metabolism, and discuss how RPE cell biology informs our understanding of retinal disease.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.preteyeres.2020.100846 | DOI Listing |
Brief Bioinform
November 2024
School of Engineering, Westlake University, No. 600 Dunyu Road, 310030 Zhejiang, P.R. China.
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) offers remarkable insights into cellular development and differentiation by capturing the gene expression profiles of individual cells. The role of dimensionality reduction and visualization in the interpretation of scRNA-seq data has gained widely acceptance. However, current methods face several challenges, including incomplete structure-preserving strategies and high distortion in embeddings, which fail to effectively model complex cell trajectories with multiple branches.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrief Bioinform
November 2024
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Mathematical and Neural Dynamical Systems, Great Bay University, No. 16 Daxue Rd, Songshanhu District, Dongguan, Guangdong, 523000, China.
Multimodal omics provide deeper insight into the biological processes and cellular functions, especially transcriptomics and proteomics. Computational methods have been proposed for the integration of single-cell multimodal omics of transcriptomics and proteomics. However, existing methods primarily concentrate on the alignment of different omics, overlooking the unique information inherent in each omics type.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Chem Theory Comput
January 2025
Faculty of Chemistry, University of Gdańsk, Fahrenheit Union of Universities, ul. Wita Stwosza 63, 80-308 Gdańsk, Poland.
Time-averaged restraints from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements have been implemented in the UNRES coarse-grained model of polypeptide chains in order to develop a tool for data-assisted modeling of the conformational ensembles of multistate proteins, intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and proteins with intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), many of which are essential in cell biology. A numerically stable variant of molecular dynamics with time-averaged restraints has been introduced, in which the total energy is conserved in sections of a trajectory in microcanonical runs, the bath temperature is maintained in canonical runs, and the time-average-restraint-force components are scaled up with the length of the memory window so that the restraints affect the simulated structures. The new approach restores the conformational ensembles used to generate ensemble-averaged distances, as demonstrated with synthetic restraints.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCirc Genom Precis Med
January 2025
Centre for Heart Lung Innovation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. (K.H., M.A., L.R., Y.L., A.S., H.H., L.R.B., Z.W.L.).
Background: Protein-truncating mutations in the titin gene are associated with increased risk of atrial fibrillation. However, little is known about the underlying pathophysiology.
Methods: We identified a heterozygous titin truncating variant (TTNtv) in a patient with unexplained early onset atrial fibrillation and normal ventricular function.
AoB Plants
January 2025
CNRS, UMR Ecologie des Forêt de Guyane (EcoFoG), AgroParisTech, CIRAD, INRAE, Université des Antilles, Université de Guyane, 97310 Kourou, France.
Phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) play important roles in plant metabolism and hydraulic balance, respectively, while calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) are important components of cell walls. Although significant amounts of these nutrients are found in wood, relatively little is known on how the wood concentrations of these nutrients are related to other wood traits, or on the factors driving the resorption of these nutrients within stems. We measured wood nutrient (i.
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