Current Molecular Medicine - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2015

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common liver disease in adults and its prevalence is rising around the world. This pathology is characterized by accumulation of liver fat, which exceeds 5% of liver weight in absence of alcohol consumption, viral infection or other hepatic etiology. Since NAFLD has been associated with obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes or alteration of lipid profiles, it is considered as the li Read More

The Klotho protein deficiency is known to participate in premature aging. As an aging suppressor, Klotho is an important molecule in aging processes and its overexpression results in longevity. Due to many reasons, the insulin/insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) has been considered as a key pathway in aging research. The Klotho gene is closely related to this pathway. The Klotho gene encodes a transmembrane protein t Read More

The endoplasmic reticulum(ER) is crucial for protein and lipid synthesis, folding and cellular homeostasis. Function impairment of ER would induce ER stress, which might play an important role in many different pathological states. Small heat shock proteins (sHsps) are known to be widely expressed throughout many tissues. SHsps are found to regulate many different pathological and pathophysiological processes and they Read More

HSPB5 or αB-crystallin (αBC) is a major protein of the vertebrate eye lens belonging to the small heat-shock protein family of proteins that respond to various stressful conditions. αBC also is found outside the lens in various non-ocular tissues and acts as a molecular chaperone by preventing aggregation of proteins, inhibits apoptosis and inflammation, and maintains cytoskeletal architecture. The αBC protein is phosphorylated Read More

Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) is a biogenic monoamine that acts as a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, local mediator in the gut and vasoactive agent in the blood. Serotonin exerts its multiple, sometimes opposing actions through interaction with a multiplicity of receptors coupled to various signalling pathways. In addition to its well-known functions, serotonin has been shown to be a mitogenic fac Read More

Immune tolerance can be induced by numerous methods. This review article aims to draw lines of similarity and contrast between two unique models of immune tolerance, namely Anterior Chamber Associated Immune Deviation (ACAID) and Nickel-induced oral tolerance. ACAID is an immune tolerance model that leads to the generation of CD4+ T regulatory cells and CD8+ T regulatory cells in the periphery after the i Read More

Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant childhood brain tumor and is associated with a poor outcome. There is an urgent need to develop novel targeted therapeutic approaches for medulloblastoma, which will arise from an enhanced understanding of the disease at the molecular level. Medulloblastoma has been recognized to be a heterogeneous disease, and no recurrent cancer gene mutations have been found, Read More

Glucocorticoids (GCs) exert their effects through regulation of gene expression after activation in the cytoplasm of the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) encoded by NR3C1 gene. A negative feedback mechanism resulting in GR autoregulation has been demonstrated through the binding of the activated receptor to intragenic sequences called GRE-like elements, contained in GR gene. The long noncoding RNA growth arrest–spec Read More

Wip1 is a serine/threonine protein phosphatase which plays a critical role in neutrophil development and maturation. In the present study, we used a neutrophildependent model of intestinal ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury to identify the role of Wip1 in neutrophil function under the condition of oxidative stress and inflammation. Wip1- deficient mice displayed more severe intestinal I/R injury with increased infiltration of neutrophi Read More