51 research outputs found
The Role of miRNAs as Key Regulators in the Neoplastic Microenvironment
The neoplastic microenvironment has been recognized to play a critical role in the development of cancer. Although a large body of evidence has established the importance of the cancer microenvironment, the manners of crosstalk between it and the cancer cells still remains unclear. Emerging mechanisms of communication include microRNAs (miRNAs). miRNAs are small noncoding RNA molecules that are involved in the posttranscriptional regulation of mRNA. Both intracellular and circulating miRNAs are differentially expressed in cancer and some of these alterations have been correlated with clinical patient outcomes. The role of miRNAs in the tumor microenvironment has only recently become a focus of research, however. In this paper, we discuss the influence of miRNAs on the tumor microenvironment as it relates to cancer progression. We conclude that miRNAs are a critical component in understanding invasion and metastasis of cancer cells
Topological network alignment uncovers biological function and phylogeny
Sequence comparison and alignment has had an enormous impact on our
understanding of evolution, biology, and disease. Comparison and alignment of
biological networks will likely have a similar impact. Existing network
alignments use information external to the networks, such as sequence, because
no good algorithm for purely topological alignment has yet been devised. In
this paper, we present a novel algorithm based solely on network topology, that
can be used to align any two networks. We apply it to biological networks to
produce by far the most complete topological alignments of biological networks
to date. We demonstrate that both species phylogeny and detailed biological
function of individual proteins can be extracted from our alignments.
Topology-based alignments have the potential to provide a completely new,
independent source of phylogenetic information. Our alignment of the
protein-protein interaction networks of two very different species--yeast and
human--indicate that even distant species share a surprising amount of network
topology with each other, suggesting broad similarities in internal cellular
wiring across all life on Earth.Comment: Algorithm explained in more details. Additional analysis adde
The small subunit of the splicing factor U2AF is conserved in fission yeast.
The human splicing factor U2 auxiliary factor (hsU2AF) is comprised of two interacting subunits of 65 and 35 kDa. Previously we identified the Schizosaccharomyces pombe homolog, spU2AF59, of the human large subunit. We have screened a fission yeast cDNA library in search of proteins that interact with spU2AF59 using the yeast two-hybrid system and have identified a homolog of the hsU2AF35 subunit. The S. pombe U2AF small subunit is a single copy gene that encodes a protein which shares 55% amino acid identity and 17% similarity with the human small subunit. Unlike the human protein, the yeast protein lacks an arginine/serine-rich region. The predicted molecular mass of the spU2AF small subunit is 23 kDa. The region of spU2AF59 that interacts with spU2AF23 is similar to the region in which the human small and large subunits interact
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