The human genome encodes over 500 microRNAs (miRNAs), small RNAs (19 to 26 nucleotides [nt]) that regulate the expressions of diverse cellular genes. Many cellular processes are altered through a variety of mechanisms by human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection. We asked whether HCMV infection leads to changes in the expression of cellular miRNAs and whether HCMV-regulated miRNAs are important fo...

MicroRNAs form one of the groups of small noncoding RNA molecules that have completely changed our understanding of gene regulatory networks. Because microRNAs have been discovered only relatively recently, most of their functions remain unknown, providing a challenge to both experiment and theory. I review several computational approaches pursued in our group to answer this challenge. In parti...

Asymmetric cell division plays an indispensable role during corticogenesis for producing new neurons while maintaining a self-renewing pool of apical progenitors. The cellular and molecular determinants favouring asymmetric division are not completely understood. Here, we identify a novel mechanism for generating cellular asymmetry through the active transportation and local translation of Cycl...

Five variant mRNA transcripts have been identi-fied. These include transcripts using different 5' untranslated regions (UTRs) including exon 1 deletions, and transcripts using different 3'UTR regions. Using rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) different KLK7 5'UTR sequences were identified from RNA extracted from pancreas, skin and ovarian cells, suggesting the expression of tissue specific ...

Emergy evaluation is an important tool to understand, quantify and characterize the flows that give support to all sort of systems, including urban areas and countries. It has the ability to account all forms of energy, resources and human services, by converting them to a same quantity, emergy, whose unit is the solar emergy joule (seJ). The methodology of analysis allows obtaining emergy indi...

Efforts to understand the genetic basis of evolutionary change have concentrated on proteins and their encoding DNA sequences. These studies have brought to light patterns and processes at the nucleotide level, yet the complex functional relationships between genetic variants and phenotypes remain poorly known. The realization that even a complete description of proteins and the effects of thei...