As a common toxic metal, lead has significant neurotoxicity to brain development. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) function in multiple biological processes. However, whether lncRNAs are involved in lead-induced neurotoxicity remains unclear. Uc.173 is a lncRNA from a transcribed ultra-conservative region (T-UCR) of human, mouse and rat genomes. We established a lead-induced nerve injury mouse mo...

Spermatozoa are one of the few mammalian cell types that cannot be fully derived in vitro, severely limiting the application of modern genomic techniques to study germ cell biology. The current gold standard approach of characterizing single-gene knockout mice is slow as generation of each mutant line can take 6-9 months. Here, we describe an in vivo approach to rapid functional screening of ge...

Previously we showed that thyroid hormone (T3) regulated the Herpes Simplex Virus Type -1 (HSV-1) gene expression and replication through its nuclear receptor TR via histone modification and chromatin remodeling in a neuroblastoma cell line neuro-2a cells (N2a). This observation suggested that T3 regulation may be neuron-specific and have implication in HSV-1 latency and reactivation. In this s...

We have previously shown that ScN2a cells (scrapie-infected neuroblastoma N2a cells) express 2-fold- and 4-fold-increased levels of IR (insulin receptor) and IGF-1R (insulin-like growth factor-1 receptor) respectively. In addition, the IR alpha- and beta-subunits are aberrantly processed, with apparent molecular masses of 128 and 85 kDa respectively, as compared with 136 and 95 kDa in uninfecte...

Taxifolin is a potent flavonoid that exerts anti-oxidative effect, and cilostazol increases intracellular cAMP levels by inhibiting phosphodiesterase 3 that shows antiinflammatory actions. BACE1 (β-site APP cleaving enzyme 1) is the rate-limiting enzyme responsible for the β-cleavage of amyloid precursor proteins to Aβ peptides. In this study, endogenous Aβ and C99 accumulation was explored in ...

Amyloid(A ) peptides, consisting mainly of 40 and 42 aa (A 40 and A 42, respectively), are metabolites of the amyloid precursor protein and are believed to be major pathological determinants of Alzheimer’s disease. The proteolytic cleavages that form the A N and C termini are catalyzed by -secretase and -secretase, respectively. Here we demonstrate that -secretase generation of A in an N2a cell...

Background: Neuroblastoma is the most common extracranial tumors in children. At present about the true etiology of neuroblastoma is unclear and many studies have tried to find effective treatments for these primary malignant tumors. Although it has been illustrated that androgen receptor (AR) was expressed in neuroblastoma cells in some former reports, the biological role of androgen receptor ...

Arsenic-induced altered microglial activity leads to neuronal death, but the causative mechanism remains unclear. The present study showed, arsenic-exposed (10 μM) microglial (N9) culture supernatant induced bystander death of neuro-2a (N2a), which was further validated with primary microglia and immature neuronal cultures. Results indicated that arsenic-induced GSH synthesis by N9 unfavorably ...

2-Aminoethoxydiphenyl borate (2-APB), an inositol 1,4,5-triphosphate receptor modulator, inhibits capacitive current transients measured in normal rat kidney and human embryonic kidney 293 cells, an indication of blocking gap junction channels between these cells. Here, we used the dual whole-cell patch-clamp method to study the actions of 2-APB on gap junction channels formed by selected conne...

objective: nucleostemin (ns) is a recently identified gene that is expressed mainly in the nucleoli of neuronal, embryonic and mesenchymal stem cells which plays a role in their self renewal. over expression of this gene has been reported in several cancer cell lines tumoral tissues including gastric, hepatic and prostate cancer. in this study, we investigated the effects of suppression of this...