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By Sophie Arthur How many diseases and conditions do you think exist in this world? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Maybe even millions? Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer. But what I do know is there could be one solution to all of them! Yes, one perfect medicine of the future! The answer? Stem cells! Stem cells, promises & superheroes Our bodies are made up of an extraordinary amount of cells – all with their own unique shape, function and gene expression, and one of the reasons there are so many diseases we need to know how to treat! But where did all these trillions of cells in our body come from? Well, we all had the same humble beginnings when we were all just a teen …

Sarah Brun Bar-Yaacov PhD Candidate, University of Liverpool Orthohantaviruses are a group of segmented negative-sense RNA viruses maintained as asymptomatic infections in rodent, insectivore and bat populations (Vaheri, Strandin, et al. 2013). They are Bunyaviruses and to date 41 orthohantavirus species have been officially recognized (ICTV 2014). Among orthohantaviruses, the rodent-borne are the most studied, as these are the only ones associated with human disease. Orthohantaviruses are found in endemic regions across the globe. Each viral species is closely associated with a specific carrier host and the presence of a specific virus in a …

The Enteric Nervous system (ENS) is one of the largest subdivisions of the Peripheral Nervous System. This remarkable system is embedded between sheets of smooth muscle cells of the intestinal tissue. It is also called as the “second brain” as it consists of millions of neurons that coalesce to form its vast network. The ENS originates from neural crest-derived progenitors that traverse through different spatio-temporal environments, expanding in number, colonizing the gut tissue and eventually generating a diverse array of neuronal and glial subtypes. The ENS is indispensable for key functions of gut physiology such as peristalsis, secretion of enzymes and absorption of food. It is …

By Eoin Mac Réamoinn Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are renowned for their fundamental roles in innate sensing and initiating inflammatory responses. TLRs accomplish this remarkable task through interactions with conserved molecular structures known as pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), such as lipopolysaccharides, that are expressed by microbial species. Once ligated, TLRs propagate stimuli via one of two intracellular signalling cascades culminating in the induced expression of pro-inflammatory genes needed for pathogen clearance and tissue remodelling. The Architecture of a Toll-like receptor …

MST2/Hippo PathwayMammalian Sterile Twenty (MST) pathways have been identified as a homologue of the ste20 kinase from Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Creasy and Chernoff 1995). The MST2/Hippo pathway has been identified as a master regulator of cell proliferation, cell death and cell differentiation (Yu and Guan 2013).The Hippo Pathway in drosophilaIn Drosophila, the Hippo pathway was first discovered with the identification of Fat and expanded proteins which were shown to regulate cell proliferation (Boedigheimer and Laughon 1993, Mahoney et al. 1991). The Hippo pathway in Drosophila is composed of a number of core proteins which have homologues in mammalian cells. The Hippo pathway was ma …

Cancer DevelopmentCancer is a group of diseases that involves abnormal cell growth resulting in malignant tumours/ malignant neoplasms. Cancer is a leading cause of morbidity, with 14 million new cases diagnosed and 8.2 million people dying from cancer in 2012 (World Health Organisation 2015). The different types of cancers are classified by the cell type they originate from. The most common cancers are breast, colorectum, lung, cervix, and stomach cancer. There are a number of risk factors that lead to cancer development such as smoking tobacco, an unbalanced diet, being overweight, alcohol use and lack of physical activity (World Health Organisation 2015) Cancer development results i …

Unregulated cell growthCancer, although heterogeneous by its very nature, can be broadly defined as a set of diseases characterised by unregulated cell growth leading to invasion of surrounding tissues and spread (metastasis) to other parts of the body (King et al., 2006). Inhibiting cell division therefore represents a key therapeutic target for cancer.Characteristics of cancer cellsIn their seminal review, Hanahan and Weinberg identified 6 key characteristics of cancer cells, namely: autostimulation; angiogenesis; metastasis; insensitivity to antiproliferative signals; resistance to apoptosis; and limitless replicative potential (Hanahan et al., 2000). This list was recently expande …

IntroductionThe human kinome is estimated to contain 518 genes, in comparison to the estimated 180 genes that comprise the phosphatome (Arena et al., 2005). These kinase genes represent a significant fraction of all eukaryotic genes, highlighting the prominent role of these enzymes in controlling key cellular functions (Manning et al., 2002). The first oncogene to be identified and characterised, Src, was found to be a tyrosine kinase (Collett et al., 1980; Czernilofsky et al., 1980). The isolation of this tyrosine kinase in 1980 came 7 years before the first tyrosine phosphatase, PTP1B, which was identified in 1987 and purified in 1988 (Lim Tung et al., 1987; Tonks et al., 1988). Inve …

Throughout my graduate and postgraduate studies I have been really intrigued and fascinated by the mitochondria, the organelle that keeps all of us running everyday! The more I learn about them, the more intricate they get. Historical Perspective on Mitochondria Function Traditionally, mitochondria were known to be a static organelle that is involved in energy production, earning the nickname “powerhouse of the cell”. But, in recent years we have learned that mitochondria are extremely dynamic organelles and can change their shape and structure by undergoing fusion and fission events to cope with metabolic demands. Mitochondrial respi …

By Natalia Siomava, PhD Cretinism is a severe medical condition of intellectual disability caused by the deficiency of thyroid hormone (congenital hypothyroidism). Severe thyroid deficiency or maternal hypothyroidism has been reported in numerous countries all over the world. It is common in areas with iodine-deficient soils (Kapil, 2007). However, each year a greater number of infants was born with congenital hypothyroidism in countries such as North America, Europe, Australia and Japan (Harris and Pass, 2007; Hinton et al., 2010).In these children, growth regulation and metabolism are misbalanced and the development is delayed early on. This resul …

Agata Miezaniec PhD Candidate, University of Nottingham, UK Epigenetics and the link to DNA Methylation The term ‘Epigenetics’ was not known in science until early 1940’s when British biologist Conrad Hal Waddington described his first developmental biology theories as an ‘epigenetic landscape’ (Waddington 1940). His hypothesis of genes controlled by epigenetics during embryo development started to evolve even before the discovery of DNA (Watson Crick 1953) and much before DNA methylation discovery (Miller et al 1978). Later on, the first definitions of the term ‘epigenetics’ tried to describe it as specific methyl …