Wnt proteins regulate many developmental processes and are required for tissue homeostasis in adult animals. The cellular responses to Wnts are manifold and are determined by the respective Wnt ligand and its specific receptor complex in the plasma membrane. Wnt receptor complexes contain a member of the Frizzled family of serpentine receptors and a co-receptor, which commonly is a single-pass ...

Iron increases synthesis rates of proteins encoded in iron-responsive element (IRE)-mRNAs; metabolic iron ("free," "labile") is Fe(2+). The noncoding IRE-RNA structure, approximately 30 nt, folds into a stem loop to control synthesis of proteins in iron trafficking, cell cycling, and nervous system function. IRE-RNA riboregulators bind specifically to iron-regulatory proteins (IRP) proteins, in...

Regulated expression of proteins involved in mammalian iron metabolism is achieved in part through the interaction of the iron regulatory proteins IRP1 and IRP2 with highly conserved RNA stem-loop structures, known as iron-responsive elements (IREs), that are located within the 5' or 3' untranslated regions of regulated transcripts. As part of an effort to determine the structures of the IRP-IR...

Cervical cancers/CCs are one of the commonest malignancies and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in women. Resveratrol inhibits CC cell growth but its molecular target(s) remains unclear. Since the signaling pathways mediated by STAT3, Notch1 and Wnt2 play beneficial roles in CC formation and progression, the effects of resveratrol on them in cervical adenocarcinoma (HeLa) and sq...

The Wnt signaling pathway plays an essential role in carcinogenesis, and the amount of fat intake and composition of dietary fatty acids are crucial factors for colon carcinogenesis. We investigated whether various dietary fats affected the Wnt signaling pathway of colon tumorigenesis in azoxymethane (AOM)-treated rats. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were given intraperitoneal injections of AOM and s...

Placental iron transport during the last trimester of pregnancy determines the iron endowment of the neonate. Iron transport is a function of the major iron transport proteins, transferrin receptor-1 (TfR-1) and ferroportin-1 (FPN-1). The mRNAs for TfR-1, and potentially FPN-1, are post-transcriptionally regulated by iron regulatory protein-1 (IRP-1) and -2 (IRP-2). We assessed the effect of ge...