447 results match your criteria: "The Donnelly Centre[Affiliation]"

Widespread anthelmintic resistance has complicated the management of parasitic nematodes. Resistance to the benzimidazole (BZ) drug class is nearly ubiquitous in many species and is associated with mutations in beta-tubulin genes. However, mutations in beta-tubulin alone do not fully explain all BZ resistance.

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The mechanisms of electrical neuromodulation.

J Physiol

January 2025

Center for Advancing Neurotechnological Innovation to Application - CRANIA, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada.

The central and peripheral nervous systems are specialized to conduct electrical currents that underlie behaviour. When this multidimensional electrical system is disrupted by degeneration, damage, or disuse, externally applied electrical currents may act to modulate neural structures and provide therapeutic benefit. The administration of electrical stimulation can exert precise and multi-faceted effects at cellular, circuit and systems levels to restore or enhance the functionality of the central nervous system by providing an access route to target specific cells, fibres of passage, neurotransmitter systems, and/or afferent/efferent communication to enable positive changes in behaviour.

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Prion protein regulates invasiveness in glioblastoma stem cells.

BMC Cancer

December 2024

Laboratory of Neurobiology and Stem Cells, Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil.

Background: Glioblastoma (GBM) is an aggressive brain tumor driven by glioblastoma stem cells (GSCs), which represent an appealing target for therapeutic interventions. The cellular prion protein (PrP), a scaffold protein involved in diverse cellular processes, interacts with various membrane and extracellular matrix molecules, influencing tumor biology. Herein, we investigate the impact of PrP expression on GBM.

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A missense variant effect map for the human tumor-suppressor protein CHK2.

Am J Hum Genet

December 2024

The Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health, Toronto, ON, Canada; Department of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Electronic address:

The tumor suppressor CHEK2 encodes the serine/threonine protein kinase CHK2 which, upon DNA damage, is important for pausing the cell cycle, initiating DNA repair, and inducing apoptosis. CHK2 phosphorylation of the tumor suppressor BRCA1 is also important for mitotic spindle assembly and chromosomal stability. Consistent with its cell-cycle checkpoint role, both germline and somatic variants in CHEK2 have been linked to breast and other cancers.

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The sinoatrial node regulates the heart rate throughout life. Failure of this primary pacemaker results in life-threatening, slow heart rhythm. Despite its critical function, the cellular and molecular composition of the human sinoatrial node is not resolved.

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Amyloids are associated with over 50 human diseases and have inspired significant effort to identify small molecule remedies. Here, we present an in vivo platform that efficiently yields small molecule inhibitors of amyloid formation. We previously identified small molecules that kill the nematode C.

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We report here the orchestration of molecular ion networking (MoIN) and a set of computationally assisted structural elucidation approaches in the discovery and assignment of a new class of rearranged 4,5--abietane diterpenoids including serra A (), which possesses an unusual 6/6/5/5 fused-ring skeleton system, together with two previously unreported diterpenoids serras B-C (-) and five known compounds were isolated from (). The structures were elucidated by spectroscopic analysis in conjunction with computationally assisted structure elucidation tools. , serras A-C (-) bind well to PXR, suggesting their potential role in reducing inflammation.

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Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps gene expression heterogeneity within a tissue. However, identifying biological signals in this data is challenging due to confounding technical factors, sparsity, and high dimensionality. Data factorization methods address this by separating and identifying signals in the data, such as gene expression programs, but the resulting factors must be manually interpreted.

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Interpretable single-cell factor decomposition using sciRED.

bioRxiv

December 2024

Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) maps gene expression heterogeneity within a tissue. However, identifying biological signals in this data is challenging due to confounding technical factors, sparsity, and high dimensionality. Data factorization methods address this by separating and identifying signals in the data, such as gene expression programs, but the resulting factors must be manually interpreted.

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Microglia signaling in health and disease - Implications in sex-specific brain development and plasticity.

Neurosci Biobehav Rev

October 2024

Graduate School of Biomedical Science and Engineering, Hanyang University, 222 Wangsimni-ro, Seongdong-gu, Seoul 133791, the Republic of Korea. Electronic address:

Microglia, the intrinsic neuroimmune cells residing in the central nervous system (CNS), exert a pivotal influence on brain development, homeostasis, and functionality, encompassing critical roles during both aging and pathological states. Recent advancements in comprehending brain plasticity and functions have spotlighted conspicuous variances between male and female brains, notably in neurogenesis, neuronal myelination, axon fasciculation, and synaptogenesis. Nevertheless, the precise impact of microglia on sex-specific brain cell plasticity, sculpting diverse neural network architectures and circuits, remains largely unexplored.

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A broad range of brain pathologies critically relies on the vasculature, and cerebrovascular disease is a leading cause of death worldwide. However, the cellular and molecular architecture of the human brain vasculature remains incompletely understood. Here we performed single-cell RNA sequencing analysis of 606,380 freshly isolated endothelial cells, perivascular cells and other tissue-derived cells from 117 samples, from 68 human fetuses and adult patients to construct a molecular atlas of the developing fetal, adult control and diseased human brain vasculature.

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Fatecode enables cell fate regulator prediction using classification-supervised autoencoder perturbation.

Cell Rep Methods

July 2024

Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; The Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; The Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health System, Toronto, ON, Canada; Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada; Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON, Canada.

Cell reprogramming, which guides the conversion between cell states, is a promising technology for tissue repair and regeneration, with the ultimate goal of accelerating recovery from diseases or injuries. To accomplish this, regulators must be identified and manipulated to control cell fate. We propose Fatecode, a computational method that predicts cell fate regulators based only on single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data.

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A parasite odyssey: An RNA virus concealed in .

Virus Evol

May 2024

Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, 1 King's College Circle, Toronto, ON M5S 1A8, Canada.

We are entering a 'Platinum Age of Virus Discovery', an era marked by exponential growth in the discovery of virus biodiversity, and driven by advances in metagenomics and computational analysis. In the ecosystem of a human (or any animal) there are more species of viruses than simply those directly infecting the animal cells. Viruses can infect all organisms constituting the microbiome, including bacteria, fungi, and unicellular parasites.

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In recent decades, the development of new drugs has become increasingly expensive and inefficient, and the molecular mechanisms of most pharmaceuticals remain poorly understood. In response, computational systems and network medicine tools have emerged to identify potential drug repurposing candidates. However, these tools often require complex installation and lack intuitive visual network mining capabilities.

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Soil-transmitted helminths (STHs) are major pathogens infecting over a billion people. There are few classes of anthelmintics and there is an urgent need for new drugs. Many STHs use an unusual form of anaerobic metabolism to survive the hypoxic conditions of the host gut.

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Most human Transcription factors (TFs) genes encode multiple protein isoforms differing in DNA binding domains, effector domains, or other protein regions. The global extent to which this results in functional differences between isoforms remains unknown. Here, we systematically compared 693 isoforms of 246 TF genes, assessing DNA binding, protein binding, transcriptional activation, subcellular localization, and condensate formation.

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Validation of the 2022 European LeukemiaNet risk stratification for acute myeloid leukemia.

Sci Rep

April 2024

Department of Medical Oncology and Hematology, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

This study aimed to validate the 2022 European LeukemiaNet (ELN) risk stratification for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). A total of 624 newly diagnosed AML patients from 1998 to 2014 were included in the analysis. Genetic profiling was conducted using targeted deep sequencing of 45 genes based on recurrent driver mutations.

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Progression through the G1 phase of the cell cycle is the most highly regulated step in cellular division. We employed a chemogenetic approach to discover novel cellular networks that regulate cell cycle progression. This approach uncovered functional clusters of genes that altered sensitivity of cells to inhibitors of the G1/S transition.

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We previously constructed TheCellVision.org, a central repository for visualizing and mining data from yeast high-content imaging projects. At its inception, TheCellVision.

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Fluorescence microscopy data describe protein localization patterns at single-cell resolution and have the potential to reveal whole-proteome functional information with remarkable precision. Yet, extracting biologically meaningful representations from cell micrographs remains a major challenge. Existing approaches often fail to learn robust and noise-invariant features or rely on supervised labels for accurate annotations.

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Revealing the grammar of small RNA secretion using interpretable machine learning.

Cell Genom

April 2024

Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; Department of Urology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA; Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, US. Electronic address:

Article Synopsis
  • Small non-coding RNAs are secreted via various mechanisms, but the sorting and secretion processes are not fully understood.
  • The study introduces ExoGRU, a machine learning model that predicts the probabilities of small RNA secretion based on their RNA sequences, validated through experimental methods.
  • The research identifies RNA-binding proteins that influence small RNA secretion and develops a technique called exoCLIP to study RNA-protein interactions, highlighting the potential of machine learning in biological research and its applications in therapeutics.
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Advancements in genomics are transforming the clinical management of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) toward precision medicine. The impact of somatic mutations on treatment outcomes is still under debate. We studied the association of somatic mutations in epigenetic modifier genes and activated signaling/myeloid transcription factors (AS/MTFs) with disease progression and treatment failure in patients with CML after tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy.

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Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the prognostic significance of the revised European LeukemiaNet (ELN)-2022 risk stratification model for 123 elderly acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients treated with decitabine chemotherapy.

Results: Based on the ELN-2022 risk stratification, 15 (12.2%), 51 (41.

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Background: Glioblastoma (GBM) is an aggressive brain tumor that exhibits resistance to current treatment, making the identification of novel therapeutic targets essential. In this context, cellular prion protein (PrP) stands out as a potential candidate for new therapies. Encoded by the PRNP gene, PrP can present increased expression levels in GBM, impacting cell proliferation, growth, migration, invasion and stemness.

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