Cultured human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can develop genetic anomalies that increase their susceptibility to transformation. In this study, we characterized a variant hESC (vhESC) line and investigated the molecular mechanisms leading to the drift towards a transformed state. Our findings revealed that vhESCs up-regulate EMT-specific markers, accelerate wound healing, exhibit compromised lineage differentiation, and retain pluripotency gene expression in teratomas. Furthermore, we discovered an altered epigenomic landscape and overexpression of the lysine methyltransferases EHMT1, EHMT2, and NSD group of proteins in vhESCs. Remarkably, depleting NSD3 oncogene reversed the molecular and phenotypic changes in vhESCs. We identified a detailed mechanism where EHMT2 interacts and methylates NSD3 at lysine 477, stabilizing its protein levels in vhESCs. In addition, we showed that NSD3 levels are regulated by protein degradation in hESCs, and its stabilization leads to the emergence of the variant state. Overall, our study identify that misregulation of NSD3 in pluripotent stem cells, through methylation-mediated abrogation of its protein degradation, drives hESCs towards oncogenic transformation.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.26508/lsa.202402871 | DOI Listing |
BMC Med Res Methodol
January 2025
Systems Engineering & Operations Research, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA.
Background: In this work, we implement a data-driven approach using an aggregation of several analytical methods to study the characteristics of COVID-19 daily infection and death time series and identify correlations and characteristic trends that can be corroborated to the time evolution of this disease. The datasets cover twelve distinct countries across six continents, from January 22, 2020 till March 1, 2022. This time span is partitioned into three windows: (1) pre-vaccine, (2) post-vaccine and pre-omicron (BA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Genomics
January 2025
Department of Food, Bioprocessing, & Nutrition Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA.
Background: The advent of next generation sequencing technologies has enabled a surge in the number of whole genome sequences in public databases, and our understanding of the composition and evolution of bacterial genomes. Besides model organisms and pathogens, some attention has been dedicated to industrial bacteria, notably members of the Lactobacillaceae family that are commonly studied and formulated as probiotic bacteria. Of particular interest is Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM, an extensively studied strain that has been widely commercialized for decades and is being used for the delivery of vaccines and therapeutics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Genet
January 2025
Division of Epidemiology, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA.
Genome-wide association studies have identified approximately 200 genetic risk loci for breast cancer, but the causal variants and target genes are mostly unknown. We sought to fine-map all known breast cancer risk loci using genome-wide association study data from 172,737 female breast cancer cases and 242,009 controls of African, Asian and European ancestry. We identified 332 independent association signals for breast cancer risk, including 131 signals not reported previously, and for 50 of them, we narrowed the credible causal variants down to a single variant.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Microbiol
January 2025
Department of Integrative Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
Ecology and evolution are considered distinct processes that interact on contemporary time scales in microbiomes. Here, to observe these processes in a natural system, we collected a two-decade, 471-metagenome time series from Lake Mendota (Wisconsin, USA). We assembled 2,855 species-representative genomes and found that genomic change was common and frequent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCell Chem Biol
December 2024
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA; Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02114, USA; Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 02114, USA. Electronic address:
Chemical inducers of proximity (CIPs) are molecules that recruit one protein to another and introduce new functionalities toward modulating protein states and activities. While CIP-mediated recruitment of E3 ligases is widely exploited for the development of degraders, other therapeutic modalities remain underexplored. We describe a non-degrader CIP-DNA-encoded library (CIP-DEL) that recruits FKBP12 to target proteins using non-traditional acyclic structures, with an emphasis on introducing stereochemically diverse and rigid connectors to attach the combinatorial library.
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