Use of Anti‑Leptin or Anti‑Leptin Receptor Antibodies as Blockers of Immune Response

Giuseppe Matarese and Veronica De Rosa

Leptin, a hormone produced primarily by adipose cells, is known to be critically involved in regulating nutrient intake and metabolism. Increasing evidence has indicated that leptin also plays crucial role in modulating immune response. Several studies including our recent findings have demonstrated...

STAT1 and STAT3 in Tumorigenesis: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Sara Pensa, Gabriella Regis, Daniela Boselli, Francesco Novelli and Valeria Poli

The transcription factors STAT1 and STAT3 appear to play opposite roles in tumorigenesis. While STAT3 promotes cell survival/proliferation, motility and immune tolerance and is considered as an oncogene, STAT1 enhances inflammation and innate and adaptive immunity, triggering in most instances anti&...

Coordinated Regulation of Vascular Ca2+ and K+ Channels by Integrin Signaling

Peichun Gui, Jun-Tzu Chao, Xin Wu, Yan Yang, George E. Davis and Michael J. Davis

A role for integrins in mechanotransduction has been suggested because these molecules form an important mechanical link between the extracellular matrix (ECM) and the cytoskeleton. An example of mechanotransduction in blood vessels is the myogenic response—the rapid and maintained constriction of a...

Helminthic Therapy: Using Worms to Treat Immune‑Mediated Disease

David E. Elliot and Joel V. Weinstock

There is an epidemic of immune‑mediated disease in highly‑developed industrialized countries. Such diseases, like inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis and asthma increase in prevalence as populations adopt modern hygienic practices. These practices prevent exposure to parasitic...

Microbial Biosurfactants and Biodegradation

Owen P. Ward

Microbial biosurfactants are amphipathic molecules having typical molecular weights of 500‑1500 Da, made up of peptides, saccharides or lipids or their combinations. In biodegradation processes they mediate solubilisation, mobilization and/or accession of hydrophobic substrates to microbes. Th...

Biomedical and Therapeutic Applications of Biosurfactants

Lígia Rodrigues and José Teixeira

During the last years, several applications of biosurfactants with medical purposes have been reported. Biosurfactants are considered relevant molecules for applications in combating many diseases and as therapeutic agents due to their antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral activities. Furthermore,...

Genomic Rearrangements: A Bubbling Source of Information for the Molecular Epidemiology of Trypanosomatids

Jean-Claude Dujardin

During recent years, molecular epidemiology emerged from the integration between molecular biology into traditional epidemiologic research (http://www.pitt.edu/~kkr/task.html). This integration represents one of the richnesses of this new discipline, but also constitutes a major challenge, molecular...

HLA and Autoimmunity Structural Basis of Immune Recognition

The MHC region on human chromosome 6p21 is a critical susceptibility locus for many human autoimmune diseases. Susceptibility to a number of these diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, is associated with particular alleles of HLA-DR or HLA-DQ genes. Crysta...

Oncogenesis in Ataxia Telangectasia: Roles of ATM, p53, NF‑kB and DDE Recombination Pathogenesis

David H. Dreyfus

The mechanistic basis of ATM (Ataxia Telangectasis Mutated) protein interactions with DNA hairpin and related double stranded DNA breaks, generated through V(D)J recombination, has been the subject of numerous recent experimental reports and reviews. The novel focus of this review is the potential s...

Involvement of Leptin in the Endometrial Function

Ana Cervero and Carlos Simon

Leptin was discovered in 1994 as the product of the OB gene and was originally thought to be produced by only adipocytes governing energy homeostasis. Nevertheless, it has since been described as a pleiotrophic hormone secreted by many tissues affecting different processes. Numerous data have been p...

The Budding Yeast PCH/F‑BAR Proteins

Alan L. Munn

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome encodes two classical Pombe Cdc15 Homology (PCH) proteins: Hof1p (or Cyk2p) and Bzz1p (or Lsb7p). Like mammalian PCH proteins, both have an N‑terminal F‑BAR domain and C‑terminal Src Homology 3 (SH3) domain(s). The yeast genome also...

Epo Delivery by Genetically Engineered C2C12 Myoblasts Immobilized in Microcapsules

Ainhoa Murua, Gorka Orive, Rosa Ma Hernández and José Luis Pedraz

Over the last half century, the use of erythropoietin (Epo) in the management of malignancies has been extensively studied. Originally viewed as the renal hormone responsible for red blood cell production, many recent in vivo and clinical approaches demonstrate that various tissues locally produce E...

Chirality, Homochirality and the Order of Biomolecular Interactions

Sandra Pizzarello

Chirality is defined formally as the property of objects that cannot be brought into congruence with their mirror image by translation or rotation. The word derives from the Greek χειρ that means hand and, in fact, the familiar name of “handedness” may explain this property more ...

Janus Kinase (JAK)‑Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription (STAT) Pathway in Heart Disease

Aneta E. Rybka, Anastasis Stephanou and Paul A. Townsend

The JAK‑STAT (Janus Kinases‑Signal Transducers and Activators of Transcription) intracellular signal transduction pathway plays a critical role in many human disease scenarios and especially in multiple aspects of the response of the myocardium to various cardiac insults. The JAK‑S...

Suppressors of Cytokine Signaling: Functions in Normal Biology and Roles in Disease

Anna C. Barry, Lynda A. O'Sullivan and Alister C. Ward

Suppressor of cytokine signaling (SOCS) proteins have been identified as key negative regulators of cytokine and growth factor signaling. Therefore, given the diverse roles played by cytokines and growth factors in development and disease, it is not surprising that the SOCS proteins themselves posse...

Developing Pharmacological Modulators of STAT Signaling

Erik A. Nelson and David A. Frank

As cancer continues to cause over 500,000 deaths per year in the United States alone, it is clear that the cytotoxic drugs commonly in use for cancer treatment are not adequately effective. As we have increased our understanding of the molecular abnormalities in cancer cells, the opportunity arises ...

Defective Somitogenesis and Abnormal Vertebral Segmentation in Man

Peter D. Turnpenny

In recent years molecular genetics has revolutionized the study of somitogenesis in developmental biology and advances that have taken place in animal models have been applied successfully to human disease. Abnormal segmentation in man is a relatively common birth defect and advances in understandin...

Old Wares and New: Five Decades of Investigation of Somitogenesis in Xenopus laevis

Duncan B. Sparrow

Somites are regular repeated structures formed in pairs on either side of the anterior‑posterior axis of developing vertebrate embryos which give rise to all skeletal muscle of the body, the axial skeleton, the tendons and the dorsal dermis. Beginning in the middle of last century, somite form...

Role of Delta-Like-3 in Mammalian Somitogenesis and Vertebral Column Formation

Gavin Chapman and Sally Dunwoodie

Somitogenesis is a term that encompasses somite formation, patterning and differentiation and it is a process that is fundamental to the formation of the axial skeleton in vertebrates. Notch signalling is a mechanism used to specify cell fate in many different contexts, with signalling occurring bet...

Genetic Analysis of Somite Formation in Laboratory Fish Models

Christoph Winkler and Harun Elmasri

The repeated appearance of somites is one of the most fascinating aspects of vertebrate embryogenesis. Recent studies identified complex regulatory circuits that provide the molecular basis for the “clock and wave front” model, postulated almost 30 years ago by Cooke and Zeeman. The highly coordinat...

Formation and Differentiation of Avian Somite Derivatives

Bodo Christ and Martin Scaal

During somite maturation, the ventral half of the epithelial somite disintegrates into the mesenchymal sclerotome, whereas the dorsal half forms a transitory epithelial sheet, the dermomyotome, lying in between the sclerotome and the surface ectoderm. The dermomyotome is the source of the majority o...

Pharmacotherapeutic Options in Solid Organ Transplantation

Jennifer Trofe, Anikphe Imoagene-Oyedeji and Roy D. Bloom

Over the past decade, advances in immunosuppressive therapies have resulted in lower rates of acute rejection and consequently, significant improvements in patient and graft survival after solid organ transplantation. Increasingly successful outcomes have focused attention on the complications of lo...

bHLH Proteins and Their Role in Somitogenesis

Miguel Maroto, Tadahiro Iimura, J. Kim Dale and Yasumasa Bessho

The most obvious manifestation of the existence of a segmented, or metameric, body plan in vertebrate embryos is seen during the formation of the somites. Somites are transient embryonic structures formed in a progressive manner from a nonsegmented mesoderm in a highly regulated process called somit...

Mouse Mutations Disrupting Somitogenesis and Vertebral Patterning

Kenro Kusumi, William Sewell and Megan L. O'Brien

The mouse was one of the first model organisms used in genetic analysis, beginning in 1902 with the studies of inheritance carried out by William E. Castle, Director of the Bussey Institute at Harvard. The first mutations identified derived from mouse fanciers, who primarily selected coat color vari...

Avian Somitogenesis: Translating Time and Space into Pattern

Beate Brand-Saberi, Stefan Rudloff and Anton J. Gamel

Vertebrates have a metameric bodyplan that is based on the presence of paired somites. Somites develop from the segmental plate in a cranio‑caudal sequence. At the same time, new material is added from Hensen’s node, the primitive streak and the tail bud. In this way, the material residing in ...