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Mashup Score: 1Organ-on-Chip immunostaining method for three-dimensional identification and study of immune cells responding to drug-treated tumor cells - 2 hour(s) ago
Epigenetic deregulation is implied in cancer initiation and resistance to antitumor drugs. In melanoma, aberrant DNA hypermethylation is frequently observed, resulting in the silencing of several genes involved in cell cycle regulation, apoptosis, tumor growth and drug resistance. DNA hypomethylating agents have been recently evaluated in both preclinical and clinical studies as a strategy to restore tumor suppressor genes and to increase immune recognition by tumors, highlighting their potential in pre-clinical models of melanoma. Advanced microfluidic system for the culture of complex three-dimensional cell, tissue and organ models have proven utility for oncoimmunology studies and drug testing. Here we present a protocol employing ad hoc fabricated microfluidic devices to reproduce a three-dimensional (3D) tumor microenvironment (TME) to study two aspects of the crosstalk between immune and cancerous cells under the effect of Decitabine (DAC), a DNMT inhibitor (DNMTi). First, we eva
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Mashup Score: 0Robust prediction of relative binding energies for protein-protein complex mutations using free energy perturbation calculations - 2 hour(s) ago
Computational free energy-based methods have the potential to significantly improve throughput and decrease costs of protein design efforts. Such methods must reach a high level of reliability, accuracy, and automation to be effectively deployed in practical industrial settings in a way that impacts protein design projects. Here, we present a benchmark study for the calculation of relative changes in protein-protein binding affinity for single point mutations across a variety of systems from the literature, using free energy perturbation (FEP+) calculations. We describe a method for robust treatment of alternate protonation states for titratable amino acids, which yields improved correlation with and reduced error compared to experimental binding free energies. Following careful analysis of the largest outlier cases in our dataset, we assess limitations of the default FEP+ protocols and introduce an automated script which identifies probable outlier cases that may require additional sc
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Mashup Score: 1ExpOmics: a comprehensive web platform empowering biologists with robust multi-omics data analysis capabilities - 2 hour(s) ago
Motivation: High-throughput technologies have yielded a broad spectrum of multi-omics datasets, offering unparalleled insights into complex biological systems. However, effectively analyzing this diverse array of data presents challenges, given factors such as species diversity, data types, costs, and limitations of available tools. Results: We propose ExpOmics, a comprehensive web platform featuring seven applications and four toolkits with 28 customizable analysis functions, spanning various aspects of differential expression, co-expression, WGCNA analysis, feature selection, and functional enrichment analysis. ExpOmics empowers users to effortlessly upload and explore multi-omics data without organism restriction, supporting a wide array of data types including gene, mRNA, lncRNA, miRNA, circRNA, piRNA, and protein expression data. It is compatible with diverse gene nomenclatures and expression value types. Moreover, ExpOmics enables users to comprehensive analysis of 22,427 transcr
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Mashup Score: 1Single-nucleus RNA/ATAC-seq Reveals SWI/SNF complex activation and allele-specific non-myocyte activation in HCM mouse models - 2 hour(s) ago
Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is associated with phenotypic variability. To gain insights into transcriptional regulation of cardiac phenotype, single-nucleus linked RNA-/ATAC-seq was performed in 5-week-old control mouse-hearts (WT) and two HCM-models (R92W-TnT, R403Q-MyHC) that exhibit differences in heart size/function and fibrosis; mutant data was compared to WT. Analysis of 23,304 nuclei from mutant hearts, and 17,669 nuclei from WT, revealed similar dysregulation of gene expression, activation of AP-1 TFs (FOS, JUN) and the SWI/SNF complex in both mutant ventricular-myocytes. In contrast, marked differences were observed between mutants, for gene expression/TF enrichment, in fibroblasts, macrophages, endothelial cells. Cellchat predicted activation of pro-hypertrophic IGF-signaling in both mutant ventricular-myocytes, and profibrotic TGF-β-signaling only in mutant-TnT fibroblasts. In summary, our bioinformatics analyses suggest that activation of IGF-signaling, AP-1 TFs and t
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Mashup Score: 1
Protein solubility plays a crucial role in various biotechnological, industrial and biomedical applications. With the reduction in sequencing and gene synthesis costs, the adoption of high-throughput experimental screening coupled with tailored bioinformatic prediction has witnessed a rapidly growing trend for the development of novel functional enzymes of interest (EOI). High protein solubility rates are essential in this process and accurate prediction of solubility is a challenging task. As deep learning technology continues to evolve, attention-based protein language models (PLMs) can extract intrinsic information from protein sequences to a greater extent. Leveraging these models along with the increasing availability of protein solubility data inferred from structural database like the Protein Data Bank (PDB), holds great potential to enhance the prediction of protein solubility. In this study, we curated an Updated E. coli protein Solubility DataSet (UESolDS) and employed a comb
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Mashup Score: 0The spatial and cellular portrait of Transposable Element expression during Gastric Cancer - 2 hour(s) ago
Gastric Cancer (GC) is a lethal malignancy, with urgent need for the discovery of novel biomarkers for its early detection. I previously showed that Transposable Elements (TEs) become activated in early GC (EGC), suggesting a role in gene expression. Here, I follow-up on that evidence using single-cell data from gastritis to EGC, and show that TEs are expressed and follow the disease progression, with 2,430 of them being cell populations markers. Pseudotemporal trajectory modeling revealed 111 TEs associated with the origination of cancer cells. Analysis of spatial data from GC also confirms TE expression, with 204 TEs being spatially enriched. Finally, a network of TE-mediated gene regulation was modeled, indicating that ~2,000 genes could be modulated by TEs, with ~500 of them already implicated in cancer. These results suggest that TEs might play a functional role in GC progression, and highlights them as potential biomarker for its early detection. ### Competing Interest Statement
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Mashup Score: 0MetaX: A peptide centric metaproteomic data analysis platform using Operational Taxa-Functions (OTF) - 2 hour(s) ago
Metaproteomics analyzes the functional dynamics of microbial communities by identifying peptides and mapping them to the most likely proteins and taxa. The challenge in this field lies in seamlessly integrating taxonomic and functional annotations to accurately represent the contributions of individual microbial taxa to functional diversity. We introduce MetaX, a comprehensive tool for analyzing taxa-function relationships in metaproteomics by mapping peptides to their lowest common ancestors and assigning functions based on proportional thresholds, ensuring accurate peptide-level mappings. Importantly, MetaX introduces the Operational Taxa-Functions (OTF), a new conceptual unit for exploring microbial roles and interactions within ecosystems. Additionally, MetaX extends traditional taxonomic classification by adding a genome level below the species level, enhancing the accuracy of function attribution to specific genomes. We demonstrated MetaX by reanalyzing metaproteomic data from gu
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Mashup Score: 0
Peptides are widely used within biomaterials to improve cell adhesion, incorporate bioactive ligands, and enable cell-mediated degradation of the matrix. While many of the peptides incorporated into biomaterials are intended to be present throughout the life of the material, their stability is not typically quantified during culture. In this work we designed a series of peptide libraries containing four different N-terminal peptide functionalizations and three C-terminal functionalization to better understand how simple modifications can be used to reduce non-specific degradation of peptides. We tested these libraries with three cell types commonly used in biomaterials research, including mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (hMSCs), endothelial cells, and macrophages, and quantified how these cell types non-specifically degraded peptide as a function of terminal amino acid and chemistry. We found that peptides in solution which contained N-terminal amines were almost entirely degraded by 48
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Mashup Score: 0Extending Homeostasis as the Principle of Driving Behavior to the Thought Dynamics Allows Comprehensive Explanation of Mind Wandering - 2 hour(s) ago
Our thoughts are inherently dynamic, often wandering far from our current situation. This unintentional transition of thought contents, called mind wandering (MW), is crucial for understanding the nature of human thought. Although previous research has identified environmental and individual factors influencing MW, a comprehensive framework that integrates these findings remains absent. This study modeled the framework of MW by applying the idea of homeostasis to action selection and replicated various findings of MW research through simulations. We trained a homeostatic reinforcement learning (HRL) model, in which an independent drive for the task-related and other actions are assigned, and a drive reductive action is rewarded with sustained attention to the response task. The results showed that the change in the response time to stimulus during MW and the proportion of MW were replicated successfully, aligning with previous studies by manipulating environment and model parameters, s
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Mashup Score: 0
Variant calling is hindered in segmental duplications by sequence homology. We developed Paraphase, a HiFi-based informatics method that resolves highly similar genes by phasing all haplotypes of a gene family. We applied Paraphase to 160 long (>10 kb) segmental duplication regions across the human genome with high (>99%) sequence similarity, encoding 316 genes. Analysis across five ancestral populations revealed highly variable copy numbers of these regions. We identified 23 families with exceptionally low within-family diversity, where extensive gene conversion and unequal-crossing over have resulted in highly similar gene copies. Furthermore, our analysis of 36 trios identified 7 de novo SNVs and 4 de novo gene conversion events, 2 of which are non-allelic. Finally, we summarized extensive genetic diversity in 9 medically relevant genes previously considered challenging to genotype. Paraphase provides a framework for resolving gene paralogs, enabling accurate testing in medically re
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Organ-on-Chip immunostaining method for three-dimensional identification and study of immune cells responding to drug-treated tumor cells https://t.co/Bv5DkgrSAJ #bioRxiv