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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Impact Of Pank1 Deletion On Mitochondrial Acetylation And Cardiac Function During Pressure Overload., Timothy N. Audam Dec 2021

Impact Of Pank1 Deletion On Mitochondrial Acetylation And Cardiac Function During Pressure Overload., Timothy N. Audam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent studies have associated elevated protein acetylation levels with heart failure in humans. Although mechanisms promoting elevated acetylation levels are not fully known, excess acetyl-CoA may drive enzyme-independent acetylation of cardiac proteins. Accumulation of acetyl-CoA depends on the availability of sufficient CoA, whose production is regulated by pantothenate kinases in the CoA biosynthetic pathway. We show that cardiac proteins are hyperacetylated during heart failure in humans and tested in mice whether limiting CoA abundance would improve ventricular remodeling during pressure overload-induced hypertrophy. We limited cardiac CoA levels by deleting the rate-limiting enzyme in CoA biosynthesis, Pank1 (one of three PANK-encoding …


Computational And Biochemical Characterizations Of Anhydrobiosis-Related Intrinsically Disordered Proteins., Brett R. Janis Dec 2021

Computational And Biochemical Characterizations Of Anhydrobiosis-Related Intrinsically Disordered Proteins., Brett R. Janis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anhydrobiosis is the remarkable phenomenon of “life without water”. It is a common technique found in plant seeds, and a rare technique utilized by some animals to temporarily stop the clock of life and enter a stasis for up to several millennia by removing all of their cellular water. If this phenomenon can be replicated, then biological and medical materials could be stored at ambient temperatures for centuries, which would address research challenges as well as enhance the availability of medicine in areas of the world where refrigeration, freezing, and cold-chain infrastructure are not developed or infeasible. Furthermore, modifying crop …


Investigating A Novel Function For Phosphoserine Aminotransferase 1 (Psat1) In Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (Egfr)-Mediated Lung Tumorigenesis., Rumeysa Biyik-Sit May 2021

Investigating A Novel Function For Phosphoserine Aminotransferase 1 (Psat1) In Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (Egfr)-Mediated Lung Tumorigenesis., Rumeysa Biyik-Sit

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Phosphoserine aminotransferase 1 (PSAT1) catalyzes the second enzymatic step within the serine synthetic pathway (SSP) and its expression is elevated in numerous human cancers, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutant NSCLC is characterized by activating mutations within its tyrosine kinase domain and accounts for 17% of lung adenocarcinomas. Although elevated SSP activity has been observed in EGFR-mutant lung cancer cells, the involvement of PSAT1 in EGFR-mediated oncogenesis is still unclear. Here, we explore a putative non-canonical function for PSAT1 using biochemical approaches to elucidate unknown interacting proteins and genomic RNA-seq profiling to identify cellular …