Lung branching morphogenesis depends on mesenchymal-epithelial tissue interactions. Keratinocyte growth factor (KGF) has been implicated to be a regulator of these tissue interactions. In the present study, we investigated the role of KGF in early rat lung organogenesis. Reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction analysis revealed KGF mRNA expression in the mesenchymal component of the 13-...

Antisense oligonucleotides are short strands of deoxyribonucleotides that are complementary to specifi c encoding mRNA sequences and can block gene expression. Their potential use as therapeutic and gene validation tools has elicited great interest. However, poor intracellular delivery into several tissues in living animals currently limits the range of in vivo applications of antisense oligonu...

MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNA molecules involved in the epigenetic regulation of carcinogenesis. miR-204-5p was shown to be among most downregulated miRs melanoma versus benign melanocytic lesions. SIRT1 as a gene target regulates proliferation, apoptosis, migration cancer cells whereas BCL2 is well known by it’s antiapoptotic functions. Therefore B16-bearing mice were treated synthetic mi...

BACKGROUND The most common pathologic form of pulmonary fibrosis arises from excessive deposition of extracellular matrix proteins such as collagen. The 47 kDa heat shock protein 47 (HSP47) is a collagen-specific molecular chaperone that has been shown to play a major role during the processing and/or secretion of procollagen. OBJECTIVES To determine whether inhibition of HSP47 could have ben...

Selecting effective antisense target sites on a given mRNA molecule constitutes a major problem in antisense therapeutics. By trial-and-error, only 1 in 18 (6%) of antisense oligonucleotides designed to target the primary RNA transcript of tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a) strongly inhibited TNF-a synthesis. Subsequent studies showed that the area in RNA targeted by antisense oligonucleotides cou...

Cyc1 mutants of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae were directly transformed with both sense and antisense oligonucleotides to examine the involvement of the two genomic DNA strands in transformation. Sense oligonucleotides yielded approximately 20-fold more transformants than antisense oligonucleotides. This differential effect was observed with oligonucleotides designed to make alterations at...

Double-stranded RNA-mediated interference (RNAi), antisense oligonucleotides (ASO), and ribozymes have excellent specificity to their target oncogenic mRNA. They also seem show great promise when it comes treating cancer. The problem is that RNAi, ASO, poor stability are constantly being degraded by nucleases. Researchers made some efforts increase oligonucleotides’ creating phospharimidate Pho...

Neuritic extension is the resultant of two vectorial processes: outgrowth and retraction. Whereas myosin IIB is required for neurite outgrowth, retraction is driven by a motor whose identity has remained unknown until now. Preformed neurites in mouse Neuro-2A neuroblastoma cells undergo immediate retraction when exposed to isoform-specific antisense oligonucleotides that suppress myosin IIB exp...

The bcr-abl oncogene is a fusion gene resulting from a reciprocal translocation which forms the hallmark of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Antisense oligonucleotides complementary to the two possible mRNA breakpoints were found to inhibit cell growth of CML patient cells and cell lines, but doubt exists about their specificity. In order to test the specificity, phosphorothioate and 3' phosphor...