Impairment of the dopaminergic (DA) system is a common cause of several movement disorders including Parkinson's disease (PD), however, little is known about the underlying disease mechanisms. The recent development of stem-cell-based protocols for the generation of DA neurons partially solved this issue, however, this technology is costly and time-consuming. Commonly used cell lines, i.e., neu...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common types of cancer worldwide. The initial hepatocellular alterations that precede the appearence of HCC include chronic viral hepatitis/cirrhosis, foci of phenotypically altered hepatocytes and, subsequently, dysplastic hepatocytes that form foci and nodules. These changes cause a discrepancy in the microenvironment of liver cells, which may...

The loss of function of DJ-1 caused by mutations in DJ1 causes a form of familial Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the role of DJ-1 in healthy and in PD cells is poorly understood. Even its subcellular localization in mammalian cells is uncertain, with both cytosolic and mitochondrial locations having been reported. We show here that DJ-1 is normally located in the cytoplasm in healthy Dictyo...

Mutations in the DJ-1 gene have been shown to cause a rare autosomal-recessive genetic form of Parkinson's disease (PD). The function of DJ-1 and its role in PD development has been linked to multiple pathways, however its exact role in the development of PD has remained elusive. It is thought that DJ-1 may play a role in regulating reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation and overall oxidative ...

The aim of this paper is to prove that an algebraic variety over a field can be desingularized locally along a valuation after a purely inseparable alteration. Zariski was first to study the problem of desingularizing algebraic varieties along valuations. He called this problem local uniformization of valuations and observed that it should be considered as the local part of the desingularizatio...

P arkinson disease (PD) is the most frequent neurodegenerative disorder, affecting about 1% of people over 50 years old. It is caused by the progressive loss of dopaminergic (DA) neurons, accompanied by the accumulation of Lewy bodies, which are abnormal structures inside nerve cells that contain proteins such as α-synuclein, Parkin, and components of the ubiquitin proteasomal pathway (a cellul...

The functional annotation of genomes, construction of molecular networks and novel drug target identification, are important challenges that need to be addressed as a matter of great urgency. Multiple complementary 'omics' approaches have provided clues as to the genetic risk factors and pathogenic mechanisms underlying numerous neurodegenerative diseases, but most findings still require functi...

We correct a result that we recently published in this conference series on the polytope of Binary Constraint Problems (BCPs). We had claimed that the so-called ”support formulation” would characterize the convex hull of all feasible solutions to tree-structured BCPs. We show that this claim is not accurate by providing a small counter example. We then show that the respective polytope defines ...

G enetic forms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are useful in helping us to understand the underlying pathophysiology of this disorder in both its rare familial forms and the more common ‘‘sporadic’’ type. Three genes are unambiguously causal in different PD families: -synuclein, parkin, and DJ-1 (reviewed in ref. 1). Two recessive mutations have been found in DJ-1, a large deletion and an L166P poi...