Background Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a movement disorder characterized by dopaminergic neurodegeneration in the substantia nigra of brain. Another neurodegenerative disorder, Alzheimer’s (AD), progressive memory loss with pathological changes mainly at hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. As dementia also present late stage PD, there might be common molecular mechanism between pathogenesis AD P...

Loss-of-function mutations in progranulin (GRN) are one of the most common genetic causes of frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disorder with no available disease-modifying treatments. Through haploinsufficiency, these mutations reduce levels of progranulin, a protein that has neurotrophic and anti-inflammatory effects. Increasing progranulin expression from t...

We present results from applying information theory based measures to simulated robots controlled by evolved Genetic Regulatory Networks. Measuring the information flow across sensory and effector surfaces, we create an information profile illustrated using area-proportional Venn diagrams. We examine the relationship between this information profile and various elements of the overall system in...

Sensor nodes in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are responsible for sensing the environment and propagating the collected data in the network. The communication between sensor nodes may fail due to different factors, such as temporal variations of the wireless channel, interference, hardware failures, and energy depletion. Hence, robust design of WSNs in order to be resilient to such failures is ...

One of the main challenges in Evolutionary Developmental Biology is to understand to which extent developmental changes are driven by regulatory alterations in the genomic sequence. In the recent years, the focus of comparative developmental studies has moved towards a systems biology approach providing a better understanding of the evolution of gene interactions that form the so called Gene Re...

Background Progressive selective deterioration of language is caused by cerebral lesions involved in processes of language elaboration and is characteristic of several forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Frontemporal dementia (FTD), that are neurodegenerative dementia and epidemiologically relevant. AD language disturbances are characterized by difficulties in word selection:...

Mitochondrial respiratory defect is a key bioenergetics feature of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells. However, their involvement and roles in HCC development and progression remain unclear. Recently, we identified 10 common mitochondrial defect (CMD) signature genes that may be induced by retrograde signaling-mediated transcriptional reprogramming in response to HCC mitochondrial defects. HC...

Introduction Frontotemporal lobar degeneration-causing mutations in the progranulin (GRN) gene reduce progranulin protein (PGRN) levels, suggesting that restoring PGRN in mutation carriers may be therapeutic. Nimodipine, a Food and Drug Administration-approved blood-brain barrier-penetrant calcium channel blocker, increased PGRN levels in PGRN-deficient murine models. We sought to assess safety...

Genetic regulatory networks (GRNs) are complex, large-scale, and spatially and temporally distributed. These characteristics impose challenging demands on software tools for building GRN models, and so there is a need for custom tools. In this paper, we report on our ongoing development of BioTapestry, an open source, freely available computational tool designed specifically for building GRN mo...

ABSTRACT For many years there have been lots of Oil Spill Response Organizations (OSROs) worldwide. Their organization, concept operations and skills to a large extend tailored their specific areas operations, members demand the OSROs own practice experience. Collaboration between has somewhat limited. During last decade, post-Macondo follow up showed – strengthened necessity tiered preparednes...