suicide is a major public health concern, with approximately one million people committing suicide world-wide each year .risk factors for suicidal behavior include, psychiatric and medical illness, impulsivity, aggression, alcohol and drug abuse specially stimulants, and  stress. neurobiological, brain mappings and biochemical studies have revealed that suicide victims experiencing a large numb...

Background: In gene therapy, the use of RNA molecules as therapeutic agents has shown advantages over plasmid DNA, including higher levels of safety. However, transient nature of RNA has been a major obstacle in application of RNA in gene therapy. Methods: Here, we used the internal ribosomal entry site of encephalomyocarditis virus and the 3’ non-translated region of Poliovirus to design an en...

background: in gene therapy, the use of rna molecules as therapeutic agents has shown advantages over plasmid dna, including higher levels of safety. however, transient nature of rna has been a major obstacle in application of rna in gene therapy. methods: here, we used the internal ribosomal entry site of encephalomyocarditis virus and the 3’ non-translated region of poliovirus to design an en...

BACKGROUND Recent study of genome-wide DNA methylation profiling in the postmortem brain of suicidal and nonsuicidal subjects found that gene expression of spindle and kinetochore associated complex subunit 2 (SKA2) is decreased in the postmortem brain of suicide victims compared with nonsuicidal, nonpsychiatric control subjects. METHODS To determine if decreased SKA2 is specific to suicide a...

The efficacy of HSV-1 thymidine kinase (TK) and Escherichia coli cytosine deaminase (CD) suicide gene therapies as cancer treatments are currently being examined in humans. We demonstrated previously that compared to single suicide gene therapy, greater levels of targeted cytotoxicity and radiosensitization can be achieved in vitro by genetically modifying tumor cells to express CD and HSV-1 TK...

Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent tumors. The switch of androgen signal dependence makes therapy more complex. Although reports on introduction of a single suicide gene exist, double suicide gene therapy has not been reported yet. In the current study, two suicide genes were constructed in the pIRES plasmid driven by PSMA promoter. 5-FC and GCV combination in vitro led to a higher gr...

background: the herpes simplex virus (hsv) ul41 gene product, virion host shutoff (vhs) protein, mediates the rapid degradation of both viral and cellular mrna. this ability suggests that vhs protein can be used as a suicide gene in cancer gene therapy applications. the recent reports have shown that the degradation of cellular mrna during herpes simplex infection is selective. rna containing a...

OBJECTIVE Gene expression changes have been reported in the brains of suicide completers. More recently, differences in promoter DNA methylation between suicide completers and comparison subjects in specific genes have been associated with these changes in gene expression patterns, implicating DNA methylation alterations as a plausible component of the pathophysiology of suicide. The authors us...

To optimize plasmid containment, we have systematically investigated the factors that limit the killing efficiency of a suicide system based on the relF gene from Escherichia coli controlled by inducible lac promoters and placed on plasmids. In induction experiments with this suicide system, killing efficiency was unaffected by temperature and growth medium; there was no requirement for great p...