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Decades of research into chronic pain in humans have deepened scientists' understanding of the cellular mechanisms underlying this process. However, the inability to account for the biological variables underlying gender may limit the clinical application of these groundbreaking findings. Recently, in a research report titled "Sex differences in peripheral immune cell activation: Implications for pain and pain resolution" published in the international journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, scientists from the University of Alberta and other institutions have revealed differences in the way male and female mice develop and relieve chronic pain in their bodies. The findings point to potential ways for scientists to develop targeted therapies for use in humans in the future.
Cancer cells use various tricks to achieve immune evasion. For example, a recent research result published by a Columbia University team in Cell found that cancer cells use the same regulatory factor to suppress anti-tumor immune responses through two different mechanisms.
α-synuclein is an important drug target for Parkinson's disease therapy, but it is also an intrinsically disordered protein that lacks a typical small molecule binding pocket. In contrast, the SNCA-encoding mRNA has an ordered structural region in its 5′ untranslated region (UTR). Recently, a research report titled "Decreasing the intrinsically disordered protein α-synuclein levels by targeting its structured mRNA with a ribonuclease-targeting chimera" was published in the international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute and other institutions have developed a new method to combat α-synuclein by targeting the mRNA that forms α-synuclein. This platform can be used to expand druggability of many challenging disease targets.
Benjamin Kleinstiver's team at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital published a research paper titled "Optimization of base editors for the functional correction of SMN2 as a treatment for spinal muscular atrophy" in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
The phenomenon of RNA interference (RNAi) is triggered by double-stranded RNA that is homologous to the target gene sequence and is a post-transcriptional silencing process of sequence-specific genes that widely exists in organisms. The endonuclease Dicer in the cytoplasm cleaves dsRNA into siRNA consisting of 21-25 nucleotides, and then the siRNA combines with proteins in the body to form the RNA-induced silencing complex RISC. RISC specifically binds to the homologous region of mRNA expressed by exogenous genes and cleaves the mRNA at the binding site. After being cleaved, the fragmented mRNA is immediately degraded, thereby blocking the post-transcriptional gene silencing mechanism of the corresponding gene expression.
Classical transfection techniques were originally developed to introduce plasmid DNA into cells, and plasmid DNA is still the most commonly used vector for transfection. DNA plasmids containing recombinant genes and regulatory elements can be transfected into cells to study gene function and regulation, carry out mutation analysis and biochemical characterization of gene products, study the impact of gene expression on cell health and life cycle, and produce proteins on a large scale for purification and downstream applications.
Cell transfection refers to the technology of introducing foreign molecules into eukaryotic cells. With the deepening of research on gene and protein functions, transfection has become one of the most commonly used technical methods in scientific research experiments. For cell transfection experiments, transfection reagents, transfection methods, and cell status will all affect the efficiency of cell transfection. This article mainly introduces several factors that affect cell transfection efficiency.
Cell transfection refers to a technology that introduces foreign genes into cells. According to the protein expression process of mammalian cells, cell transfection is required after cell culture is completed, and different transfection methods are selected according to different experimental purposes. At present, commonly used cell transfection methods are mainly divided into three categories: physically mediated (electroporation, gene gun, microinjection), chemically mediated (lipofectamine transfection, calcium phosphate precipitation, cationic lipid transfection, cationic polymer transfection), biologically mediated (virus-mediated transfection, protoplast transfection).
Transfection is an important technology in molecular biology and cell biology research. It allows us to introduce exogenous genes into cells to conduct gene function research, gene expression regulation, or gene therapy. Conventional transfection techniques can be divided into two categories: transient transfection and stable transfection (permanent transfection).
Transfection refers to introducing an exogenous DNA or RNA into target cells and causing it to be expressed or replicated. After transfection, the introduced nucleic acid may temporarily exist in the cell and be expressed only for a limited period of time without replication. It may also exist stably and be integrated into the genome of the recipient cell and replicate together with the host genome replication. Transfection is often used in biological research. It can be used to introduce foreign genes, change the proteins or RNA expressed by cells, and study their functions and mechanisms by observing these changes.
