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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Single-Fluorophore Sensors For Mechanical Force In Living Cells, Sarah Kricheff
Single-Fluorophore Sensors For Mechanical Force In Living Cells, Sarah Kricheff
Honors Scholar Theses
Mechanotransduction is the process by which a mechanical stimulus is converted to a cellular signal. This process is heavily influential of cell morphology, differentiation, and behavior. However, altered levels of mechanical stimuli are also found in many pathological contexts. For example, cancerous cells have stiffer surrounding tissue than healthy cells, and research suggests that this alters cell behavior and promotes metastasis. Despite these findings, the cellular processes behind these signaling alterations remain widely unknown. Understanding these cascades is critical, as involved proteins can give us a deeper understanding of the role of mechanotransduction, and certain proteins can potentially be targeted …
Mechanisms Of Statin Effects On Muscle And Neuronal Proteostasis, Daniel Yu
Mechanisms Of Statin Effects On Muscle And Neuronal Proteostasis, Daniel Yu
University Scholar Projects
Statins are widely prescribed and used chronically, but we know little about the effects on long-term protein homeostasis during stress and aging. Our aim was to quantify the effect of statins on stress-induced protein damage. We administered atorvastatin in a dose-response curve in Caenorhabditis elegans under naïve control conditions and in conditions of hypertonic and heat stress known to induce muscle damage measurable as countable puncta in a polyglutamine aggregation model of damage. We observed that there is significant polyglutamine aggregation variability among worms at baseline and thus further study requires within experiment baseline controls, per worm. Our results are …