Gastric cancer is a world health problem and depicts the fourth leading mortality cause from malignancy in Mexico. Causation of gastric cancer is not only due to the combined effects of environmental factors and genetic variants. Recent molecular studies have transgressed a number of genes involved in gastric carcinogenesis. The aim of this review is to understand the recent basics of gene expr...

O rganisation of multicellular animals involves the action of genes that impart ‘‘positional information’’. All vertebrates are built on a segmental pattern that is most obviously expressed by the appearance of somites during embryonic development. A common feature of genes that impart individual identity (and therefore positional information) to specific segments is the possession of a ‘‘homeo...

INTRODUCTION The digestive system is important for the maintenance of vertebrate physiology. After the endoderm progenitors are specified, they differentiate into epithelial cells of the embryonic gut. In amniotes such as mice, the endodermal layer of the mouse embryo begins to form a gut tube at embryonic day 8.5 (E8.5) by folding at the anterior end, resulting in the anterior intestinal porta...

Retinoic acid (RA), an active derivative of the liposoluble vitamin A (retinol), acts as an important signaling molecule during embryonic development, regulating phenomenons as diverse as anterior-posterior axial patterning, forebrain and optic vesicle development, specification of hindbrain rhombomeres, pharyngeal arches and second heart field, somitogenesis, and differentiation of spinal cord...

Resveratrol is a grape polyphenol with cardioprotective attributes, supported in part by its demonstrated anti-mitogenic, apoptosis-inducing and gene modulatory activities in various cell types known to play an integral role in atherogenesis. To test whether resveratrol exerts similar effects on systemic and pulmonary vasculature, cells derived from different anatomical sites, cultured human ao...

Genetic analysis in the IL10-deficient mouse model revealed a modifier locus of experimental inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) on chromosome 18, with the allele of the strain C3H/HeJBir (C3Bir) conferring resistance and the allele of C57BL/6J (B6) conferring susceptibility. Differential Cd14 expression was associated with this background specific susceptibility to intestinal inflammation. Polymo...

We have utilized retinoic acid receptor γ (gamma) knockout (RARγ(-/-)) embryonic stem (ES) cells as a model system to analyze RARγ mediated transcriptional regulation of stem cell differentiation. Most of the transcripts regulated by all-trans retinoic acid (RA) in ES cells are dependent upon functional RARγ signaling. Notably, many of these RA-RARγ target genes are implicated in retinoid uptak...