Immunotoxins are an important class of antibody-based therapeutics. The potency of the immunotoxins depends on the antibody fragments as the guiding modules targeting designated molecules on cell surfaces. Phage-displayed synthetic antibody scFv libraries provide abundant antibody fragment candidates as targeting modules for the immunoconjugates, but the discovery of optimally functional immuno...

Expression of optogenetic tools in surviving inner retinal neurons to impart retinal light sensitivity has been a new strategy for restoring vision after photoreceptor degeneration. One potential approach for restoring retinal light sensitivity after photoreceptor degeneration is to express optogenetic tools in retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). For this approach, restoration of ON and OFF center-s...

Background The formation of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) with extrusion nuclear, granular and cytosolic components from a dying neutrophil, has been described extensively in patients rheumatoid arthritis (RA), linked to generation autoantigens (e.g. citrullinated proteins), inflammation organ damage. Thus far there have very few studies describing the effect treatment RA on NET formati...

There is an ongoing struggle to develop efficient drug delivery and targeting methods within the central nervous system. One technique known as intrathecal drug delivery, involves direct drug infusion into the spinal canal and has become standard practice for treating many central nervous system diseases due to reduced systemic toxicity from the drug bypassing the blood-brain barrier. Although ...

The CRISPR system has become a powerful biological tool with a wide range of applications. However, improving targeting specificity and accurately predicting potential off-targets remains a significant goal. Here, we introduce a web-based CR: ISPR/Cas9 O: ff-target P: rediction and I: dentification T: ool (CROP-IT) that performs improved off-target binding and cleavage site predictions. Unlike ...

The CRISPR/Cas or Cas9/guide RNA system is a newly developed, easily engineered and highly effective tool for gene targeting; it has considerable off-target effects in cultured human cells and in several organisms. However, the Cas9/guide RNA target site is too short for existing alignment tools to exhaustively and effectively identify potential off-target sites. CasOT is a local tool designed ...

Emerging evidence suggests that dopamine may modulate learning and memory with important implications for understanding the neurobiology of memory and future therapeutic targeting. An influential hypothesis posits that dopamine biases reinforcement learning. More recent data also suggest an influence during both consolidation and retrieval. Eighteen Parkinson's disease patients learned through ...

The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/associated 9 (Cas9) technology has been recently added to the tools allowing efficient and easy DNA targeting, representing a very promising approach to gene engineering. Using the CRISPR/Cas9 system we have driven the integration of exogenous DNA sequences to the X-linked Hprt gene of mouse embryonic stem cells. We show here...