Reduced glucose metabolism in specific brain regions has been shown to correlate with clinical cognitive dysfunction, and preclinical research studies showed that reduced glucose metabolism can amplify learning and memory deficits. A recent study by Yang et al.  showed that succinylation, a metabolism-associated PTM, provides a potential link between abnormal metabolism and Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology. Surprisingly, in AD patients, succinylation of a small number of cytosolic proteins increased, and two targets in particular were amyloid precursor protein (APP) and microtubule-associated tau...

Above: Schematic of Succinylation and Desuccinylation of target proteins

February 2022

March 2022

Multicellular organization requires rapid changes in biomechanical dynamics and establishment of a collective actomyosin network in order to maintain cell morphology. How human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) orchestrate cytoskeletal tension across cells and organize adhesion complexes to maintain cytoarchitectural integrity is incompletely understood. Recent work by the Friedel lab.....

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Vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) oscillate between a differentiated (contractile) and a de-differentiated (synthetic) phenotype. In a recent study by Talwar et al., the group discovered that VSMCs, under selective ECM conditions, can also exist in a null state and can be driven towards the conventional differentiated or de-differentiated phenotypes in response to Rac and Rho signaling. The group used a combination of mathematical and computational modeling to identify...

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