Macroautophagy is a catabolic process, in which portions of cytoplasm or organelles are delivered to lysosomes for degradation. Emerging evidence has indicated a pathological connection between axonal degeneration and autophagy. However, the physiological function and induction mechanism of autophagy in axons remain elusive. We herein show that, through activation of BECLIN1, glycogen synthase ...

Activation of apoptosis in cardiomyocytes by saturated palmitic acids contributes to cardiac dysfunction in diabetic cardiomyopathy. Beta-catenin (b-catenin) is a transcriptional regulator of several genes involved in survival/anti-apoptosis. However, its role in palmitate-induced cardiomyocyte apoptosis remains unclear. Glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP1) has been shown to exhibit potential cardiop...

Cancer stem cell (CSC) based gene expression signatures are associated with prognosis in various tumour types and CSCs are suggested to be particularly drug resistant. The aim of our study was first, to determine the prognostic significance of CSC-related gene expression in residual tumour cells of neoadjuvant-treated gastric cancer (GC) patients. Second, we wished to examine, whether expressio...

Multiple recent lines of evidence have underscored the potential role of glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK3) as a common molecular signal integrator and therapeutic target for different classes of psychiatric drugs (Figure 1). GSK3a and GSK3b are two closely related serine/threonine kinases originally associated with the regulation of glycogen synthesis in response to insulin (Embi et al., 1980)....

Multitarget agents have been extensively explored for solving limited efficacies, poor safety, and resistant profiles of an individual target. Theoretical approaches for searching and designing multitarget agents are critically useful. Here, the performance of molecular docking to search dual-target inhibitors for four kinase pairs (CDK2-GSK3B, EGFR-Src, Lck-Src, and Lck-VEGFR2) was assessed. F...

An imbalance in dopamine-mediated neurotransmission is a hallmark physiological feature of neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. Recent evidence demonstrates that dopamine D(2) receptors, which are the main target of antipsychotics, modulate the activity of the protein kinase Akt, which is known to be downregulated in the brain of patients with schizophrenia. Akt has an important r...

Recent studies have revealed that oxidative stress has detrimental effects in several models of neurodegenerative diseases, including subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). However, how oxidative stress affects acute brain injury after SAH remains unknown. We have previously reported that overexpression of copper/zinc-superoxide dismutase (SOD1) reduces oxidative stress and subsequent neuronal injury a...