Cell-based therapies are an exciting frontier in medicine. This field is built on a simple premise—cells can be engineered to recognize and treat various human diseases. The paradigm of cell-based therapy uses biosensors to interrogate a cell’s environment and distinguish disease from health, intracellular signaling pathways and genetic circuitry to...
Bumble bees are ecologically and economically important pollinators but have experienced rapid declines in recent decades. Yet, we know little about the lives of most wild bumble bee species. Where do they live? When are they active? What do they eat? What does all this mean for the future of...
Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is an essential mediator of senescence and a potential therapeutic target for preventing aging-related pathologies. Cellular Senescence is associated with organismal aging and related pathologies. In our study, we investigate the efficacies of PAI-1 inhibitors in both in vitro and in vivo models of homocysteine...
The goal of this project was to better understand the pathogenesis behind rheumatoid arthritis(RA), an autoimmune disorder that primarily affects the joints. Despite affecting around 1.3 million people in the United States, its causes are not well-understood. Previous research at Pope Lab indicated that when compared to the healthy controls,...
With concerns about how to feed an exponentially growing, increasingly obese population, humanity’s relationship with food is a pressing concern. Evaluating the evolutionary changes in the composition of gut microbiota (GM), defined as the microorganisms that live in the digestive tract, may offer insight into how human bodies have adapted...
Physiological linkage (i.e., the covariation of moment-to-moment physiology between individuals) is thought to play an important role in relationship functioning. The present study examined physiological linkage across interbeat interval (IBI) and skin conductance levels (SCL) in a sample of married spouses (N=106) during both a pleasant and a conflict conversation...
The formation of neuronal inclusions is one of the hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases. These structures are composed of aggregated proteins, molecular chaperones, and components of the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS). Co-localization of aggregated proteins with cell-homeostasis maintaining machinery indicates that the cell may be failing in an attempt to clear these...
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common non-cutaneous cancer among U.S. men. Lack of effective treatments for advanced disease make it a significant public health concern. However, PCa’s long natural history makes it an excellent target for prevention approaches that reduce overtreatment of indolent disease, treatment related morbidity, and mortality....
Ionizing radiation is known for being dangerous at high doses, beneficial for diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and expensive for hazardous waste disposal and other protection policies governments put in place. Balancing the benefits and risks is key to maximizing public health, reducing public fears, and reducing extraneous costs that...
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common aggressive primary malignant brain tumorin adults with a median age of onset of 65 years of age. Although advanced age is often associated with worse GBM patient survival, the predominant source(s) of maladaptive aging
effects remains to be established. Here we studied intra-tumoral and...
Some of the oldest drugs targeting metabolism are the antifolates such as aminopterin and methotrexate (MTX). MTX started being used in the 1950s to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Aminopterin and MTX both target one carbon metabolism and inhibit proliferation of cells. MTX was a potent inhibitor of inflammation, because it prevented...
Proteins represent a critical class of biomolecules, universally employed by all living organisms to fulfill essential structural, functional, and enzymatic roles necessary to support life. In nature, these polymers are composed generally of twenty natural amino acid (AA) building blocks, which can be modified with covalent adducts known as post-translational...
Down syndrome occurs in approximately 1 in 700 births annually in the United States. It is caused by trisomy of chromosome 21, and is characterized by dysmorphic features and congenital abnormalities. Although children with DS have a decreased risk of developing solid tumors, they have an increased risk of acquiring...
Mitochondrial complex I is the primary entry point for electrons into the mitochondrial electron transport chain that is composed of 45 individual protein subunits that are encoded in both the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. Mitochondrial complex I sits at an important nexus in the essential bioenergetic, biosynthetic, and signaling functions...
The treatment of AML remains to be a challenge due to the high rates of resistance and relapse experienced by patients after initial therapy. The MAPK-interacting kinases 1 and 2 (MNK1/2) have generated increasing interest as therapeutic targets for AML due to their critical role in malignant hematopoietic transformation via...
Kaposi’ sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) causes primary effusion lymphoma (PEL). PEL cell lines require expression of the cellular FLICE inhibitory protein (cFLIP) for survival, although KSHV encodes a viral homolog of this protein (vFLIP). Cellular and viral FLIP proteins have several functions, including, most importantly, the inhibition of pro-apoptotic caspase 8...
Tumor-initiating cells with reprogramming plasticity are thought to be essential for cancer development and metastatic regeneration in many cancers; however, the molecular mechanisms are not fully understood. We have previously identified that CD44, a breast tumor-initiating cell marker, drives mammosphere self-renewal and multicellular aggregation of circulating tumor cell (CTC) clusters,...
Phenotypic variation is the functional unit that evolution acts upon and is the main contributor to the diversity of species. The phenotype of an individual is shaped by genetic and environmental factors. These genetic and environmental factors contribute to biomedically relevant traits such as an individual’s susceptibility to disease and...
Biological systems comprise diverse collections of cellular and non-cellular components with intricate relationships and dynamic interactions. To gain system-level understanding, we must be able to accurately model these systems, both experimentally and computationally. Agent-based models (ABMs) in particular are a uniquely intuitive, modular, and flexible framework capable of supporting multi-scale,...
With the ability to rapidly screen and manipulate genomes, the in depth study of the functional actors of biology—metabolites and proteins—is necessary to understand complex biochemistry in developmental and disease states. The analytical processes by which biological information is gained from metabolomics and proteomics experiments must also evolve with our...