Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology Commons^™

Improved Radiation Expression Profiling In Blood By Sequential Application Of Sensitive And Specific Gene Signatures, Eliseos J. Mucaki, Ben C. Shirley, Peter K. Rogan

Biochemistry Publications

Purpose. Combinations of expressed genes can discriminate radiation-exposed from normal control blood samples by machine learning based signatures (with 8 to 20% misclassification rates). These signatures can quantify therapeutically-relevant as well as accidental radiation exposures. The prodromal symptoms of Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) overlap those present in Influenza and Dengue Fever infections. Surprisingly, these human radiation signatures misclassified gene expression profiles of virally infected samples as false positive exposures. The present study investigates these and other confounders, and then mitigates their impact on signature accuracy.

Methods. This study investigated recall by previous and novel radiation signatures independently derived …

The Role Of Med31 And Med12 In Directing Adipogenesis Of Human Adult-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells, Joseph Straub

Doctoral Dissertations

Selective gene expression is crucial in maintaining the self-renewing and multipotent properties of stem cells. Mediator is a large, evolutionarily conserved, multisubunit protein complex that modulates gene expression by relaying signals from cell type-specific transcription factors to RNA polymerase II. In humans, this complex consists of 30 subunits arranged in four modules: head, middle, tail, and kinase. In our introduction, we show the state of the field of Mediator study with a focus on the critical kinase module. In the following chapters, we used siRNA knockdowns to investigate the roles of the highly-conserved core subunit MED31 and the kinase module …

The Analysis Of Folate-Dependent Transcription Factor Zinc Finger Protein 410, Feifan Xu

Senior Honors Theses

A previous study that introduced dietary folate to mice in the form of folic acid to determine if gene activity would be altered based on this biological molecule demonstrated that mice without folic acid had cognition deficits, and this phenomenon was correlated with altered gene expression in their brains. The included bioinformatic analysis revealed two main transcription factors that bind to proteins in the nucleus, and one is known as the Zinc Finger Protein 410 (Zfp410). Due to the lack of literature explaining the function of this transcription factor, this project is intended to analyze Zfp410 in detail from scratch. …

Identification Of Ires Activity In Cellular Mrnas And Viral Rna Using A Circular Rna Construct, Priyanka Sehta

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Translation initiation is a critical step in the process of protein synthesis. The canonical way of translation initiation involves ribosomes being recruited to the 7-methyl guanosine cap present at the 5’end of the untranslated region (5’ UTR) of the RNAs. However, viral RNAs and some cellular mRNAs lack this 5’ cap structure and thus deploy an alternate non-canonical translation initiation mechanism. In non-canonical translation initiation, ribosome recruitment is facilitated by the RNA secondary structures called Internal Ribosome Entry Site (IRES) present most often in the 5’ UTR. To measure IRES-mediated translation, the dual luciferase assay has been the gold standard. …