Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-288).

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Cardiovascular disease (CVD) causes 45% of on-duty firefighter fatalities, a high fraction even when compared to the risk of CVD found in other first-responder professions like police work and emergency medical services. Monitoring and managing firefighter cardiac health is important for both individual health and public safety. In our study, we are interested in assessing the utility of the most commonly used risk assessment scoring, known as the Framingham Risk Score, in evaluating the atherosclerotic risk in asymptomatic firefighters. To this end we determined FRS for 159 male firefighters from Gwinnett County, Georgia, and compared their risk categorization against their known atherosclerotic burden as determined by CIMT and CAC. While the 20% FRS threshold, corresponding to medium risk, had a high specificity for both CAC and CIMT, it also had a low sensitivity (17% and 40%, respectively), indicating that a large percentage of individuals with clinically significant atherosclerosis are being misclassified. By adjusting the FRS threshold downward, we were able to raise the sensitivity greatly with only a modest loss of specificity. Following percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty for the treatment of coronary artery disease, stents are commonly implanted at the treatment site to prevent recoil and negative remodeling. To combat in-stent restenosis, an arterial healing response that results in luminal loss in stented arteries, anti-restenotic drugs like sirolimus (SES) and zotarolimus (ZES) are commonly eluted by stents to suppress cell proliferation at the treatment site. While comparative studies have revealed significant difference between bare metal stents (BMS), SES, and ZES in both clinical and histological arterial response, the molecular basis of these differences remains poorly understood. We conducted a comparative gene expression profiling study using microarrays to examine differences in gene expression and pathway function in coronary arteries exposed to ZES, SES, and BMS in a porcine animal model. These molecular profiles suggest a model of delayed restenosis, resulting from a drug-induced suppression of inflammatory responses and proliferative processes, rather than an elimination of restenosis. microRNAs play a regulatory role in metastasis-related epithelial to mesenchymal transitions and mesenchymal to epithelial transitions in ovarian cancer cells. We previously showed that over-expression of miR-429 in ovarian cancer cells drove a transition from mesenchymal phenotypes to epithelial phenotypes both in morphology and expression of markers like ZEB1, ZEB2, and E-cadherin. Our study represents the first time course analysis of miR-429-induced MET in ovarian cancer cells. We transfected Hey cells with miR-429 and assayed gene expression over the course of 144 hours at regular intervals. The cell morphology and gene expression of our transfected cells changed to become more epithelial-like at 24 and 48 hours and then became more mesenchymal-like by 144 hours. By 144 hours the average gene expression levels for 98.6% of our genes were not significantly different from the levels they started from at 0 hours when we adjusted for baseline expression changes observed in our negative control treated cells. This suggests the use of microRNAs as cancer therapies and driving cancer cells to a more drug susceptible state.

Orientador: Gonçalo Amarante Guimães Pereira / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Biologia / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-12T09:23:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lepikson-Neto_Jorge_M.pdf: 1765356 bytes, checksum: c73289c953d58c6b221c2e0927805499 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: Com o intuito de obter informações relevantes para o melhoramento genético do eucalipto para a produção de biomassa, o presente trabalho buscou comparar a expressão dos genes relacionados com a formação e desenvolvimento da madeira em quatro diferentes espécies de eucalipto, tendo como objetivo identificar os padrões que as tornam mais aptas, bem como quais genes relacionados com determinadas características. Essa análise abre a possibilidade da identificação de genes chave que possam ser manipulados, através do melhoramento clássico ou da transgênia, para aumentar o conteúdo relativo de celulose das plantas, incrementando a sua eficiência para processos econômicos. 384 ESTs do banco de dados do Consórcio Genolyptus foram selecionadas para serem analisadas através da tecnologia de microarranjos de cDNA. Foram selecionadas ESTs de genes com funções conhecidas relacionadas com a formação da madeira, bem como de genes relacionados com o desenvolvimento do vegetal e de genes com função ainda desconhecida. Os dados obtidos foram cruzados com a biblioteca de ESTs do Consorcio Genolyptus (Northern Eletrônico), e foram feitos PCR em tempo real para os principais genes diferenciais nos microarranjos e para os genes da via de lignina e flavonóides. Os resultados mostraram que diferentes genes estão expressos nas espécies estudadas sendo um grande número deles ainda com função desconhecida no metabolismo do eucalipto. A maioria dos genes relacionados com a formação da parede celular não apresentou perfil de expressão diferencial nos microarranjos, sugerindo que as diferenças fenotípicas entre as madeiras das espécies estudadas podem estar sustentadas em vias alternativas, com fatores de elongação, cliclínas e outros genes desempenhando papel importante, bem como genes ainda não relacionados com o desenvolvimento da parede celular e ou ao desenvolvimento do vegetal. Os experimentos com PCR em tempo real mostraram que genes da via de flavonóides relacionados com a via de lignina e formação da madeira podem estar desempenhando papeis importantes no controle da formação da madeira da espécie. Esses resultados representam avanços significativos no entedimento da formação da madeira em eucalipto e servem como base para orientar futuras investigações no intuito de melhorar geneticamente esta espécie. / Abstract: In this work we intended to assemble relevant information for the genetic engineering of Eucalyptus for biomass production by comparing gene expression of genes related with the xylem and wood development of four different Eucalyptus species with distinct caractheristics, as a form to identify patterns and wich genes are possibly related to their differences. This analysis opens the possibilities to manipulate the specie and increase the overall celluloses content and its purpose for industrial production. 384 ESTs were selected from de Genolyptus database and analysed by microarryay cDNA experiments. Among the ESTs selected some were related to wood formation, cell wall assembly and some still had no general function known on the specie. The data from the microarray experiments were then crossed with the Genolyptus ESTs lybrary (Eletronic Northern) and Real-Time PCR were performed for the most relevant resultas as well as the genes from de lignin and flavonoid pathway. Results show that different genes are expressed among the xylem of the four species studied and most of them still have no related function to the metabolism of the plant. Most of the genes related to cell wall formation were not differentially expressed on the microarrays suggesting that the differences on the quality and structure of the wood among the four species might as well be resulted from the expression of alternative pathways and genes such as elongation factors, ciclins and others not yet related to the cell wall formation and wood development. Real-Time PCR experiments shown that genes from the flavonoid pathway related to lignin and wood formation might be playing a crucial role determining wicht pathway must be followed and therefore the type and quality of the wood on Eucalyptus. These results represent significant advances to our understanding on the formation of wood on Eucalyptus and will be valuable as a basis for future investigation aiming genetic engeneering of the specie. / Mestrado / Bioquimica / Mestre em Biologia Funcional e Molecular

No description available.

No description available.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In this thesis, we have firstly cloned and expressed the domains that harbours the putative catalytic GC domain in these receptor molecules and demonstrate that these molecules can convert GTP to cGMP in vitro. Secondly, we show that exogenous application of both Phytosulfokine and Brassinosteroid increase changes of intracellular cGMP levels in Arabidopsis mesophyll protoplast demonstrating that these molecules have GC activity in vivo and therefore provide a link as second messenger between the hormones and down-stream responses. In order to elucidate a relationship between the kinase and GC domains of the PSK receptor, we have used the AtPSKR1 receptor as a model and show that it has Serine/Threonine kinase activity using the Ser/Thr peptide 1 as a substrate. In addition, we show that the receptor`s ability to phosphorylate a substrate is affected by the product (cGMP) of its co-domain (GC) and that the receptor autophosphorylates on serine residues and this step was also observed to be affected by cGMP. When Arabidopsis plants are treated with a cell permeable analogue of cGMP, we note that this can affect changes in the phosphoproteome in Arabidopsis and conclude therefore that the cGMP plays a role in kinase-dependent downstream signalling. The obtained results suggest that the receptor molecules investigated here belong to a novel class of GCs that contains both a cytosolic kinase and GC domains, and thus have a domain organisation that is not dissimilar to that of atrial natriuretic peptide receptors NPR1 and NPR2. The findings also strongly suggest that cGMP has a role as a second messenger in both Brassinosteroid and Phytosulfokine signalling. We speculate that other proteins with similar domain organisations may also have dual catalytic activities and that a significant number of GCs, both in plants and animals, remain to be discovered and characterised. / South Africa

A transcription factor (TF) is a protein that binds to specific DNA sequences as part of the initiation stage of transcription. Various methods of finding these transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) have been developed. In vivo technologies analyze DNA binding regions known to have bound to a TF in a living cell. Most widely used in vivo methods at the moment are chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by deep sequencing (ChIP-seq) and DNase I hypersensitive sites sequencing. In vitro methods derive TFBS based on experiments with TFs and DNA usually in artificial settings or computationally. An example is the Protein Binding Microarray which uses artificially constructed DNA sequences to determine the short sequences that are most likely to bind to a TF. The major drawback of this approach is that binding of TFs in vivo is also dependent on other factors such as chromatin accessibility and the presence of cofactors. Therefore TFBS derived from the PBM technique might not resemble the true DNA binding sequences. In this work, we use PBM data from the UniPROBE motif database, ChIP-seq data and DNase I hypersensitive sites data. Using the Spearman’s rank correlation and area under receiver operating characteristic curve, we compare the enrichment scores which the PBM approach assigns to its identified sequences and the frequency of these sequences in likely binding regions and the human genome as a whole. We also use central motif enrichment analysis (CentriMo) to compare the enrichment of UniPROBE motifs with in vivo derived motifs (from the JASPAR CORE database) in their respective TF ChIP-seq peak region. CentriMo is applied to 14 TF ChIP-seq peak regions from different cell lines. We aim to establish if there is a relationship between the occurrences of UniPROBE 8-mer patterns in likely binding regions and their enrichment score and how well the in vitro derived motifs match in vivo binding specificity. We did not come out with a particular trend showing failure of the PBM approach to predict in vivo binding specificity. Our results show Ets1, Hnf4a and Tcf3 show prediction failure by the PBM technique in terms of our Spearman’s rank correlation for ChIP-seq data and central motif enrichment analysis. However, the PBM technique also matched the in vivo binding specificities of FoxA2, Pou2f2 and Mafk. Failure of the PBM approach was found to be a result of variability in the TF’s binding specificity, the presence of cofactors, narrow binding specificity and the presence ubiquitous binding patterns.

Characterising transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) is an important problem in bioinformatics, since predicting binding sites has many applications such as predicting gene regulation. ChIP-seq is a powerful in vivo method for generating genome-wide putative binding regions for transcription factors (TFs). CentriMo is an algorithm that measures central enrichment of a motif and has previously been used as motif enrichment analysis (MEA) tool. CentriMo uses the fact that ChIP-seq peak calling methods are likely to be biased towards the centre of the putative binding region, at least in cases where there is direct binding. CentriMo calculates a binomial p-value representing central enrichment, based on the central bias of the binding site with the highest likelihood ratio. In cases where binding is indirect or involves cofactors, a more complex distribution of preferred binding sites may occur but, in many cases, a low CentriMo p-value and low width of maximum enrichment (about 100bp) are strong evidence that the motif in question is the true binding motif. Several other MEA tools have been developed, but they do not consider motif central enrichment. The study investigates the claim made by Zhao and Stormo (2011) that they have identified a simpler method than that used to derive the UniPROBE motif database for creating motifs from protein binding microarray (PBM) data, which they call BEEML-PBM (Binding Energy Estimation by Maximum Likelihood-PBM). To accomplish this, CentriMo is employed on 13 motifs from both motif databases. The results indicate that there is no conclusive difference in the quality of motifs from the original PBM and BEEML-PBM approaches. CentriMo provides an understanding of the mechanisms by which TFs bind to DNA. Out of 13 TFs for which ChIP-seq data is used, BEEML-PBM reports five better motifs and twice it has not had any central enrichment when the best PBM motif does. PBM approach finds seven motifs with better central enrichment. On the other hand, across all variations, the number of examples where PBM is better is not high enough to conclude that it is overall the better approach. Some TFs bind directly to DNA, some indirect or in combination with other TFs. Some of the predicted mechanisms are supported by literature evidence. This study further revealed that the binding specificity of a TF is different in different cell types and development stages. A TF is up-regulated in a cell line where it performs its biological function. The discovery of cell line differences, which has not been done before in any CentriMo study, is interesting and provides reasons to study this further.

No abstract available / Dissertation (MSc (Bioinformatics))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Biochemistry / MSc / unrestricted