Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, in which pancreatic β cells are destroyed by autoreactive T cells in genetically predisposed individuals. Serum beta cell autoantibody specificities have represented the mainstay for classifying diabetes as autoimmune-mediated and for stratifying risk in first-degree relatives. In recent years, approaches were attempted to solve the difficult issue of d...

For a motor unit to function, neurons and muscle cells need to adopt their correct cell fate, form appropriate cellular contacts, and assemble a specific repertoire of signaling proteins into presynaptic and postsynaptic structures. In the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a disruption of any of these steps causes uncoordinated locomotory behavior (unc phenotype). We report here the positional c...

UNLABELLED MicroRNAs miR-122, miR-34a, miR-16 and miR-21 are commonly deregulated in liver fibrosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. This study examined whether circulating levels of these miRNAs correlate with hepatic histological disease severity in patients with chronic hepatitis C infection (CHC) or non-alcoholic fatty-liver disease (NAFLD) and can potentially serve as circulating markers for ...

Leishmania donovani causes visceral leishmaniasis (VL) where the parasite infects and resides inside liver and spleen tissue macrophages. Given the abnormal lipid profile observed in VL patients, we examined the status of serum lipids in an experimental murine model of VL. The murine VL liver displayed altered expression of lipid metabolic genes, many of which are direct or indirect targets of ...

S ince the discovery in 2005 of the essential role of the liver-specific microRNA, miR-122, in HCV replication (1), the mechanism by which it stimulates this process has proved elusive. In PNAS, Li et al. demonstrate thatmiR-122 acts to shield the HCV genome against degradation by the cytosolic RNA exonuclease, Xrn1 (2). Although this may be one way in which this microRNA promotes HCV replicati...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short noncoding RNAs, which bind to messenger RNAs and regulate protein expression. The biosynthesis of miRNAs includes two precursors, a primary miRNA transcript (pri-miRNA) and a shorter pre-miRNA, both of which carry a common stem-loop bearing the mature miRNA. MiR-122 is a liver-specific miRNA with an important role in the life cycle of hepatitis C virus (HCV). It is ...

MiR-122 is one of the non-coding RNAs which showed its effects on the lipo-metablism, virus infection and HCC forming through regulation of liver gene expression. Its eukaryotic expression vector was constructed by using pSuper which was widely applied in the siRNA expression. The precursor of human miR-122 gene was amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) from the human genomic DNA. The po...

BACKGROUND Liver-specific microRNA (miR)-122 has been shown to be involved in regulating translation of hepatitis C viral (HCV) RNA. This study aimed to explore the molecular mechanism of miR-122 in regulating HCV RNA translation initiation. MATERIAL/METHODS In human liver hepatocellular carcinoma cell line HepG2, UV cross-link assay was performed on a large scale to identify RNA-binding prot...

An important host factor for hepatitis C virus (HCV) is microRNA-122 (miR-122). miR-122 is a liver-specific member of a family of small, non-coding RNA molecules known as microRNAs that play major roles in the regulation of gene expression by direct interaction with RNA targets. miR-122 binds directly to two sites in the 5' untranslated region (UTR) of HCV RNA and positively regulates the viral...