Mitochondria in White, Brown, and Beige Adipocytes

Mitochondria play a key role in energy metabolism in many tissues, including cardiac and skeletal muscle, brain, liver, and adipose tissue. Three types of adipose depots can be identified in mammals, commonly classified according to their colour appearance: the white (WAT), the brown (BAT), and the beige/brite/brown-like (bAT) adipose tissues. WAT is mainly involved in the storage and mobilization of energy and BAT is predominantly responsible for nonshivering thermogenesis. Recent data suggest that adipocyte mitochondria might play an important role in the development of obesity through defects in mitochondrial lipogenesis and lipolysis, regulation of adipocyte differentiation, apoptosis, production of oxygen radicals, efficiency of oxidative phosphorylation, and regulation of conversion of white adipocytes into brown-like adipocytes. This review summarizes the main characteristics of each adipose tissue subtype and describes morphological and functional modifications focusing on mitochondria and their activity in healthy and unhealthy adipocytes

Relation of tumor genotype and phenotype to diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of colorectal cancer

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common type of malignity. Despite of the existence of numerous studies focused on this carcinoma, there are still many unknown features regarding its diagnosis, treatment or prognosis. In the thesis we focused on the identification of novel prognostics markers that could be useful for the stratification of patients based on the disease outcomes. In the first study we immunohistochemically assessed expression of two proteins associated with cancer stem cells in the samples of primary colorectal cancer and matched liver metastasis. Goal of the study was to evaluate relation among expression of CD44 and CD133 and overall survival and disease free interval in our set of patients. We observed that increased ratio of CD133 positive compared to CD133 negative tumor glands resulted in longer disease free interval, finding which is opposite to the general view on the CD133 role in the cancer development. Our hypothesis is that we analyzed confined group of patients and followed a bit different goal, where we measured ratio between positive and negative glands in the view-field and not the intensity of staining as the previous studies did. Our second study was focused on the transcriptional analysis of the selected set of twelve genes using frozen samples from colorectal..

Comparative genomic prediction of novel transmembrane adaptor proteins and their expression analysis.

Transmembrane adaptor proteins play an important role in signal transduction cascades emanating from immune cell receptors leading to cellular effector mechanisms. Despite the lack of enzymatic function, their sequence contains interaction motifs which organize other proteins in time and space and initiates building of the signaling complexes. Functionally the most important and for the longest time known TRAPs are the ones associated with immune receptors. Their deficiency has severe impacts on the signal transduction and knock-out mice show dramatic phenotypes. The deficiency of Lat - the first discovered TRAP, which is not constitutively associated with immune receptors - has comparable effects on signaling in lymphocytes. The difference between the first group of TRAPs and Lat is not only the type of association with receptors, but also the lack of tyrosine - based activation motifs (ITAMs) in Lat, but Lat contains several other binding motifs also based on the phosphorylation of tyrosine. The group of TRAPs similar to Lat up today contains eight members, but all of them, except of Lat, has only very mild or undetectable phenotype in the knock-out mice. In this work I searched the protein databases for proteins with the characteristics of TRAP using the bioinformatic tools. Based on our..

Functional annotation of short protein linear motifs - bioinformatic analysis

Dep. of Physiology and Develop. Biology (obsolete)Katedra fyziol. živočichů a vývoj. biol. (zrušena)Přírodovědecká fakultaFaculty of Scienc