Abstract The emergence of the new corona virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic requires fast development of novel prevention and therapeutic strategies. These rely on understanding the biology of the virus and its interaction with the host, and on agnostic phenotypic screening for compounds that prevent viral infection. In vitro sc...
Published in Essays in biochemistry
RNA is crucial for gene expression and regulation. Recent advances in understanding of RNA biochemistry, structure and molecular biology have revealed the importance of RNA structure in cellular processes and diseases. Various approaches to discovering drug-like small molecules that target RNA structure have been developed. This review provides a b...
Published in Virulence
Mammalian infection models have contributed significantly to our understanding of the host-mycobacterial interaction, revealing potential mechanisms and targets for novel antimycobacterial therapeutics. However, the use of conventional mammalian models such as mice, are typically expensive, high maintenance, require specialized animal housing, and ...
Published in Biomolecules
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of global mortality, which has caused a huge burden on the quality of human life. Therefore, experimental animal models of CVD have become essential tools for analyzing the pathogenesis, developing drug screening, and testing potential therapeutic strategies. In recent decades, zebrafish has entered...
Published in Nanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland)
In the present work, we report the studies on perfectly homogeneous nanocomposites composed of polystyrene-grafted silver nanoparticles ([email protected]) as a bioactive fulfilment and a mixture of polystyrene (PS) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as a matrix. The procedure developed by our group of the nanocomposites' preparation consists of three steps: synthesi...
Peptidoglycan (PG) is made of a polymer of disaccharides organized as a three-dimensional mesh-like network connected together by peptidic cross-links. PG is a dynamic structure that is essential for resistance to environmental stressors. Remodeling of PG occurs throughout the bacterial life cycle, particularly during bacterial division and separat...
Published in Biotechnology progress
The acquired drug chemoresistance represents the main challenge of the ovarian cancer treatment. In addition, the absence of an adequate in vitro model able to reproduce the native tumor environment can contribute to the poor success rate of pre-clinical studies of new compounds. Three-dimensional (3D) culture models have been recently used for dru...
Published in ACS infectious diseases
Schistosomiasis is a major neglected tropical disease with more than 200 million infections annually. Despite only one drug, praziquantel, being available, the drug pipeline against schistosomiasis is empty, and drug screening tools have limitations. We evaluated the potential of human liver microtissues (hLiMTs) in antischistosomal drug discovery....
Published in International Journal of Molecular Sciences
Animal venoms are small natural mixtures highly enriched in bioactive components. They are known to target at least two important pharmacological classes of cell surface receptors: ion channels and G protein coupled receptors. Since sperm cells express a wide variety of ion channels and membrane receptors, required for the control of cell motility ...
Published in Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Along with the increasing popularity of larval zebrafish as an experimental animal in the fields of drug screening, neuroscience, genetics, and developmental biology, the need for tools to deal with multiple larvae has emerged. Microfluidic channels have been employed to handle multiple larvae simultaneously, even for sensing electroencephalogram (...
