Owing to their strong migratory capacity, tumor tropism, and tumor inhibitory effect, neural stem cells (NSCs) have recently emerged as one of the most attractive gene delivery vectors for cancer therapy. However, further animal studies found that proportional NSC vectors were distributed to nontarget organs after intravenous injection and the nonspecific transgene expression led to significant...

Microribonucleic acids (miRNAs) work with exquisite specificity and are able to distinguish a target from a non-target based on a single nucleotide mismatch in the core nucleotide domain. We questioned whether miRNA regulation of gene expression could occur in a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-specific manner, manifesting as a post-transcriptional control of expression of genetic polymorph...

RNA interference (RNAi) can silence genes at the transcriptional level by targeting locus-specific Lys9H3 methylation or at the post-transcriptional level by targeting mRNA degradation. Here we have cloned and sequenced genomic regions methylated in Lys9H3 in Neurospora crassa to test the requirements for components of the RNAi pathway in this modification. We find that 90% of clones map to rep...

Somatic hypermutation (SHM) of immunoglobulin genes is initiated by activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) in activated B cells. This process is strictly dependent on transcription. Hence, cis-acting transcriptional control elements have been proposed to target SHM to immunoglobulin loci. The Mus musculus Igκ locus is regulated by the intronic enhancer (iE/MAR) and the 3' enhancer (3'E), a...

Disrupted-In-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1), a strong genetic candidate for psychiatric illness, encodes a multicompartmentalized molecular scaffold that regulates interacting proteins with key roles in neurodevelopment and plasticity. Missense DISC1 variants are associated with the risk of mental illness and with brain abnormalities in healthy carriers, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. We e...