Gene-replacement gene therapy has been under development for a number of years. In spite of the large amount of research invested into developing gene therapy for the treatment of recessive genetic disorders only a limited number of patients world-wide have received the benefits. In addition, several high profile adverse events in gene therapy trials have lead to an increasing awareness of the ...

Friedreich's ataxia is a severe neurodegenerative disease caused by the decreased expression of frataxin, a mitochondrial protein that stimulates iron-sulfur (Fe-S) cluster biogenesis. In mammals, the primary steps of Fe-S cluster assembly are performed by the NFS1-ISD11-ISCU complex via the formation of a persulfide intermediate on NFS1. Here we show that frataxin modulates the reactivity of N...

TALEs targeting a promoter sequence and fused with a transcription activation domain (TAD) may be used to specifically induce the expression of a gene as a potential treatment for haploinsufficiency. This potential therapeutic approach was applied to increase the expression of frataxin in fibroblasts of Friedreich ataxia (FRDA) patients. FRDA fibroblast cells were nucleofected with a pCR3.1 exp...

Progressive signs of ataxia in a eight year old girl with hypo-active knee and ankle jerks, prompted the analysis of the frataxin gene (FXN; 606829). The most common molecular abnormality--GAA trinucleotide repeat expansion in intron 1--was found with +300 GAA repeats (1490 bp) (normal individuals have 5 to 30 GAA repeats expansions, whereas affected individuals have from 70 to more than 1000 G...

Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA) is an incurable autosomal recessive neurodegenerative disease caused by reduced expression of the mitochondrial protein frataxin due to an intronic GAA-repeat expansion in the FXN gene. We report the therapeutic efficacy of transplanting wild-type mouse hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) into the YG8R mouse model of FRDA. In the HSPC-transplanted YG8R mic...

The aim of this study was to investigate auditory pathway function and speech perception ability in individuals with Friedreich ataxia (FRDA). Ten subjects confirmed by genetic testing as being homozygous for a GAA expansion in intron 1 of the FXN gene were included. While each of the subjects demonstrated normal, or near normal sound detection, 3 of the 10 showed electrophysiological evidence ...

A new electrochemical method for the identification and quantification of Fenamiphos pesticide's major metabolite in biological samples – Sulphoxide (FNX) was developed. Computational calculations, Density Functional Theory (DFT) semi-empirical models (PM3) were performed to determine best monomer, pyrrole, a ratio 1 : 5 (template: monomer) chosen fabrication FNX?MIP sensor obtained by electrop...

The YFH1 gene is the yeast homologue of the human FRDA gene, which encodes the frataxin protein. Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells lacking the YFH1 gene showed very low cytochrome content. In Deltayfh1 strains, the level of ferrochelatase (Hem15p) was very low, as a result of transcriptional repression of HEM15. However, the low amount of Hem15p was not the cause of haeme deficiency in Deltayfh1 c...

Friedreich ataxia is considered a neurodegenerative disorder involving both the peripheral and central nervous systems. Dorsal root ganglia (DRG) are the major target tissue structures. This neuropathy is caused by mutations in the FXN gene that encodes frataxin. Here, we investigated the mitochondrial and cell consequences of frataxin depletion in a cellular model based on frataxin silencing i...