Published in iScience
Brown adipose tissue (BAT) has the ability to burn calories as heat. Utilizing BAT thermogenesis is thus an attractive way to combat obesity. However, the transcriptional network resulting in the lipid synthesis to oxidation shift during thermogenesis is not completely understood. Here, we report the regulation of two master regulators of adipogene...
Published in iScience
Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) can originate from either fallopian tube epithelial (FTE) or ovarian surface epithelial (OSE) cells, but with different latencies and disease outcomes. To address the basis of these differences, we performed single cell RNA-sequencing of mouse cells isolated from the distal half of fallopian tube (FT) and surface lay...
Published in iScience
Eukaryotic cells transit through the cell cycle to produce two daughter cells. Dysregulation of the cell cycle leads to cell death or tumorigenesis. Herein, we found a subunit of the ER membrane complex, EMC3, as a key regulator of cell cycle. Conditional deletion of Emc3 in mouse embryonic mesoderm led to reduced size and patterning defects of mul...
Published in iScience
Female mice display greater adipose angiogenesis and maintain healthier adipose tissue than do males upon high-fat diet feeding. Through transcriptome analysis of endothelial cells (EC) from the white adipose tissue of male and female mice high-fat-fed for 7 weeks, we found that adipose EC exhibited pronouncedly sex-distinct transcriptomes. Genes u...
Published in iScience
Some hemipteran insects rely on multiple endosymbionts for essential nutrients. However, the evolution of multi-partner symbiotic systems is not well-established. Here, we report a co-obligate symbiosis in the eusocial aphid, Ceratovacuna japonica. 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing unveiled co-infection with a novel Arsenophonus sp. symbiont and Buchner...
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D/E repeats are stretches of aspartic and/or glutamic acid residues found in over 150 human proteins. We examined genomic stability of D/E repeats and functional characteristics of D/E repeat-containing proteins vis-à-vis the proteins with poly-Q or poly-A repeats, which are known to undergo pathologic expansions. Mining of tumor sequencing data re...
Published in iScience
The functional tight junctions' integrity plays an important role in liver physiology. A variety of liver diseases have been associated with the perturbation of tight junctions. Herein, we showed that the lower expression of α5 integrin in hepatocytes in patients with liver cirrhosis is associated with matrix deposition in the space of Disse. Selec...
Published in iScience
Apocynaceae plants produce toxic cardenolides to defend against their herbivores. Cardenolides could inhibit the α subunit of Na+⁄K+-ATPase (ATPα), which plays critical roles in biological processes such as muscle contraction, neural function, and osmoregulation. Numerous herbivores that specialized on cardenolides-producing milkweeds carry paralle...
Published in iScience
Evolution has long been considered to be a conservative process in which new genes arise from pre-existing genes through gene duplication, domain shuffling, horizontal transfer, overprinting, retrotransposition, etc. However, this view is changing as new genes originating from non-genic sequences are discovered in different organisms. Still, rather...
Published in iScience
Dyslipidemia including the accumulation of cholesteryl esters (CEs) in the brain is associated with neurological disorders, although the underlying mechanism has been unclear. PDZD8, a Rab7 effector protein, transfers lipids between endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and Rab7-positive organelles and thereby promotes endolysosome maturation and contributes ...
