Recently, unique areas of transcriptional regulation termed super-enhancers have been identified and implicated in human disease. Defined by their magnitude of size, transcription factor density, and binding of transcriptional machinery, super-enhancers have been associated with genes driving cell differentiation. While their functions are not completely understood, it is clear that these regio...

Gene-regulatory enhancers have been identified using various approaches, including evolutionary conservation, regulatory protein binding, chromatin modifications, and DNA sequence motifs. To integrate these different approaches, we developed EnhancerFinder, a two-step method for distinguishing developmental enhancers from the genomic background and then predicting their tissue specificity. Enha...

Background Among the chemical class of coumarins several substances have been described to be effective as cognition enhancers. We have recently characterized the coumarin scopoletin as a compound which fits a pharmacophore model of AChE inhibitors and enhances the release of ACh in rat brain [1]. Now, a comprehensive study was carried out in order to investigate the effects of scopoletin on le...

Palm oil-based esters (POEs) are unsaturated and non-ionic esters with a great potential to act as chemical penetration enhancers and drug carriers for transdermal drug nano-delivery. A ratio of palmitate ester and nonionic Tween80 with and without diclofenac acid was chosen from an experimentally determined phase diagram. Molecular dynamics simulations were performed for selected compositions ...

Eukaryotic gene expression is regulated by enhancer-promoter interactions but the molecular mechanisms that govern specificity have remained elusive. Genome-wide studies utilizing STARR-seq identified two enhancer classes in Drosophila that interact with different core promoters: housekeeping enhancers (hkCP) and developmental enhancers (dCP). We hypothesized that the two enhancer classes are o...

Embryogenesis is remarkably robust to segregating mutations and environmental variation; under a range of conditions, embryos of a given species develop into stereotypically patterned organisms. Such robustness is thought to be conferred, in part, through elements within regulatory networks that perform similar, redundant tasks. Redundant enhancers (or "shadow" enhancers), for example, can conf...

OBJECTIVES Searching for chemicals that will safely enhance transdermal drug delivery is a significant challenge. This study applies support vector regression (SVR) for the first time to estimating the optimal formulation design of transdermal hydrocortisone formulations. METHODS The aim of this study was to apply SVR methods with two different kernels in order to estimate the enhancement rat...