Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) and their associated cyclins are key regulators of cell cycle progression. Caenorhabditis elegans has two predicted A- type cyclins, encoded by the genes cya-1 and cya-2. Cyclin A has been shown to be required for...
Prion diseases are progressive disorders that affect the central nervous system leading to memory loss, personality changes, ataxia and neurodegeneration. In humans, these disorders include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru and...
Metal ions confer structural stability and reactivity to a large number of proteins that use the amino acids histidine (His) and cysteine (Cys) to form stable metal-ligand complexes. The stability of metal-His and metal-Cys interactions and their...
Phospholipase C -- Mechanism of action. Retinal degeneration -- Pathophysiology. Retinal degeneration -- Genetic aspects. Endocytosis. Rhodopsin. Cellular signal transduction. Light -- Physiological effect. Arrestin. Clathrin. Adaptor Proteins
Mutations in the Drosophila retinal-specific Phospholipase C (NORPA) cause massive retinal degeneration within five days of constant light exposure. We have previously shown that in norpA mutants persistent complexes between the light receptor...
Arabidopsis thaliana -- Physiology. Zinc -- Physiological transport. Iron -- Physiological transport. Homeostasis. Trace elements in plant nutrition.
Iron and zinc are essential metal micronutrients that most humans acquire from plant-based diets. Unfortunately, plants are not a good source of these micronutrients, so billions of people worldwide suffer from deficiencies of these two elements....
Circadian rhythms in a wide variety of cellular and metabolic processes are well documented in many organisms. An important step in understanding the molecular basis of the circadian clock is the characterization of clock-controlled genes. mRNA...
Circadian rhythms. ; Light -- Physiological effect. ; Temperature -- Physiological effect. ; Photoreceptors. ; Arabidopsis thaliana -- Effect of light on. ; Arabidopsis thaliana -- Effect of temperature on. ; Arabidopsis thaliana -- Genetics. ;...
The synchronization of a circadian clock to the outside environment is a crucial step in the daily life of most organisms. Light and temperature signals help an organism reset its circadian clock. In the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a number...
Protein kinase C. Antigen presenting cells. Antigens -- Receptors. T cells -- Receptors. Major histocompatibility complex -- Genetic aspects. CD4-Positive T-Lymphocytes -- immunology. Histocompatibility Antigens Class II -- immunology. Receptors
Activation of CD4 T cells to exogenous antigens requires the formation and surface display of antigen-derived peptide-MHC class II complexes by antigen presentation cells. Acquisition of peptide by MHC class II is much studied, but the rules and...
The demand for novel molecularly targeted drugs will continue to rise as we make progress toward personalizing cancer treatments to the molecular signatures of individual tumors. While the collection and analysis of genomic data has become routine,...
Protein phosphorylation is an important regulatory mechanism for the control of countless processes in living systems. The delicate management of phosphate attachment to, and removal from, serine, threonine and tyrosine residues in proteins...
Gustatory pheromones regulate mating behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster and represent an important model for understanding how sensory stimuli can drive behavior. However, the genes and cells involved in pheromone detection have remained poorly...
In utero exposure to maternal malnutrition is associated with increase offspring susceptibility to cardiometabolic and neuropsychiatric disease. Epigenetic mechanisms mediate, at least in part, fetal adaptations to adverse in utero environments...
The overarching goal of this thesis was two-fold. First, to determine if the effects of chronic anabolic androgenic steroid (AAS) treatment on anxiety-like behaviors are sex-specific and second to determine how different environmental modulators...
The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is responding sensitively to climate change and its meltwater has the potential to influence global sea level. Recently, large changes in the GrIS have occurred including increased velocities of outlet glaciers and...
Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and other high-throughput initiatives have led to an information explosion in human genetics and genetic epidemiology, the mapping from genotype to phenotype remains challenging as most of the...
The BCL2 family of proteins control intrinsic apoptosis at the mitochondria through a delicate balance of pro and anti-apoptotic proteins. Anti-apoptotic proteins are frequently relied upon by cancer cells, making them ideal targets for...
The multisubunit eukaryotic Mediator complex integrates diverse positive and negative gene regulatory signals and transmits them to the core transcription machinery. It is also involved in chromatin structure related epigenetic silencing through...
The present thesis is focused on developing a better understanding of factors driving disease biology and overall risk using cancers of the bladder and breast as model systems. As no single approach was likely to unravel the complexities of these...
ID proteins are naturally occurring dominant negative HLH-transcription factors that are highly expressed during development but generally not expressed in adult tissue except for selected cell types and some stem cells. Also, aberrant expression...
Acyl-CoA:Cholesterol Acyltransferases (ACATs) are key enzymes in cellular cholesterol metabolism. ACAT converts free cholesterol to cholesterol ester, which makes it more easily storable in lipid droplets. There are two ACAT genes encoding two...
Core Binding Factors (CBFs) are members of a small family of transcription factors that play critical roles in a number of mammalian developmental processes. CBFs are heterodimers consisting of a CBFα subunit, which contacts and binds DNA at the...
Solar (Computer architecture). ; Ubiquitous computing. Sensor networks. ; Detectors. ; User interfaces (Computer systems).
The complexity of developing context-aware pervasive-computing applications calls for distributed software infrastructures that assist applications to collect, aggregate, and disseminate contextual data. In this dissertation, we present a Context...
Prostacyclin (PGI 2 ) is a major product of COX-2 catalyzed metabolism of arachidonic acid in the endothelium and has been shown to be atheroprotective. PGI 2 signals though its G-coupled protein receptor (GPCR) the human Prostacyclin receptor...
Since its discovery in the 1930's, the Cherenkov effect has been paramount in the development of high-energy physics research. It results in light emission from charged particles traveling faster than the local speed of light in a dielectric...
While Cherenkov emission was discovered more than eighty years ago, the potential applications of imaging this during radiation therapy have just recently been explored. With approximately half of all cancer patients being treated by radiation at...
Despite all the efforts and progress in cancer research, cancer remains a devastating disease. After more than 120 years of research, immunotherapy provides a realistic hope to cure cancer. Several formats of immunotherapy, such as...
CD4+ T cells are critical for the control of virus infections, memory cell formation and immune surveillance. Epstein-Barr virus and Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus are two γ-herpesviruses identified in humans and are strongly associated...
Arctic soils in the permafrost region store substantially more carbon than is contained in the atmosphere, and are undergoing rapid change associated with anthropogenic climate change. Soil decomposition is an important component of ecosystem...
Cupredoxins, such as stellacyanin, plastocyanin, amicyanin, rusticyanin, and azurin perform electron transfer (ET) reactions with partner protein(s) in the cell. The role of the redox cofactor in these proteins is played by a copper ion, which...
Genome sequencing technology has enabled the identification of genetic variants that are linked with cancer phenotypes, whether these are somatically acquired mutations or common inherited single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Whereas coding...
For most cancers, the genetic mechanisms that predispose normal cells to neoplastic transformation and tumor cells to therapeutic eradication are poorly understood. High throughput genotyping technologies have allowed the rapid discovery of...
Protein secretion is executed by the secretory pathway, which involves the delivery of membrane and soluble secretory proteins in vesicle intermediates that capture newly-synthesized proteins assembled in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and then...
How the genome is shaped directly influences how it is expressed. In fact, the genome is organized at many different levels, each imparting specific regulation over transcription. Fundamental principles regulating genome organization are poorly...
Chromosomal instability (CIN) is defined as a high rate of whole chromosome loss or gain and is a hallmark of many aneuploid solid tumors. CIN positively correlates with poor patient prognosis and chemotherapeutic resistance. The persistence of...
The Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway controls numerous biological processes from embryogenesis to adult homeostasis; aberrant Wnt signaling underlies a wide range of human diseases. In the absence of Wnt stimulation, a multiprotein “destruction...
The main driving force behind the development of computers was the attempt to solve problems that would otherwise require a large amount of time to be solved. Despite the technological development that has made computers ubiquitous in daily lives,...
Dendritic cells. Biological response modifiers. Immune response -- Regulation. T cells. CD antigens. Dendritic Cells -- Immunology. Receptors
Dendritic cells (DCs) are professional antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that regulate antigen-specific T cell activation or tolerance. The maturation state of DCs is critical since immature DCs are believed to induce T cell tolerance whereas mature...
The pain that follows nerve injury is chronic and consistently refractory to available analgesics. Neuropathic pain syndromes include deafferentation pain, diabetic, cancer and ischemic neuropathies, phantom limb pain, trigeminal neuralgia,...
The essential QSR1 gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a member of a highly conserved family of genes found in eukaryotic and archaebacterial cells. QSR1 was discovered by its synthetic lethal relationship with QCR6, the nuclear encoded gene for...
The Arabidopsis catalase gene family contains at least three genes, encoding subunits which combine in tetramers to form 7 detectable isozymes. Two of these genes are within 250 bp of each other at a single locus (CAT3/1) near the top of chromosome...
Metals are ubiquitous in our environment. Through evolution, many biological processes have taken advantage of and have become dependent on specific metals for various biochemical functions. Metals can also be toxic to biological systems at...
Breast -- Cancer -- Tomography. ; Breast -- Cancer -- Imaging. ; Breast -- Cancer -- Diagnosis. ; Near infrared reflectance spectroscopy. ; Image processing -- Digital techniques.
Near-infrared (NIR) light has the potential to be used as a non-invasive means of diagnostic imaging within the human breast. Due to the diffusive nature of light in tissue, computational model-based methods are required for functional imaging...