Traditional cell cultures have long been fundamental to biological research, offering an alternative to animal models burdened by ethical constraints and procedural intricacies, often lacking relevance to human physiology and disease. Moreover, their inabi ...
Cells are the smallest operational units of living systems. Through synthesis of various biomolecules and exchange of signals with the environment, cells tightly regulate their composition to realize a specific functional state. The transformation of a cel ...
The last two decades have seen the development of organoid models for many different tissues and organs. Organoids are three-dimensional organ-mimetics derived from stem or progenitor cells comprising various specialized cell types, resembling the architec ...
Background aims: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of blindness in elderly patients within developed countries, affecting more than 190 million worldwide. In AMD, the retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cell layer progressively d ...
As the fundamental machinery orchestrating cellular functions, proteins influence the state of every cell profoundly. As cells exhibit significant variations from one to another, analyzing the proteome on a single-cell level is imperative to unravel their ...
Proteins are foundational biomolecules of life playing a crucial role in a myriad of biological processes. Their function often requires interplay with other biomolecules, including proteins themselves. Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are essential for ...
Organoids, miniature tissues generated from self-organizing stem cells within three-dimensional (3D) extracellular matrices (ECM), have opened up exciting possibilities for in vitro studies of complex physiological processes. A key factor in the success of ...
In the domain of computational structural biology, predicting protein interactions based on molecular structure remains a pivotal challenge. This thesis delves into this challenge through a series of interconnected studies.The first chapter introduces th ...
This study combined protein modeling methods to generate the prolamins' fractions as precise as possible. Hence, gliadins, zeins, kafirins, hordeins, secalins, avenins and oryzins were generated based on their characteristics and disulfide mapping. Finding ...
Cysteine cathepsins proteases are enzymes that play essential physiological roles, but their activity is also associated to different aspects of cancer progression and to the development of other diseases. Therefore, cysteine cathepsins are relevant and pr ...
Post-translational modifications (PTMs) play a pivotal role in regulating protein structure, interaction, and function. Aberrant PTM patterns are associated with diseases. Moreover, individual PTMs have a complex interaction with each other, known as PTM c ...
Communication between the intestine and other organs such as the lungs, brain or bones is mediated by several metabolites, like short-chain fatty acids or bile acids, that relay information about nutritional and microbiota status. Bile acids are endogenous ...
This thesis presents an extensive exploration of neuroelectronic interfaces, focusing on microfabrication, in silico modeling, and their applications in designing and fabricating devices for neural interfacing. The research encompasses both peripheral nerv ...
Inflammation stands as a dynamic and intricate biological process, promoting vital defence mechanisms against harmful stimuli, including infections and injuries, to drive pathogen clearance and healing. On one hand, these responses can manifest acutely and ...
Cell fate progression of pluripotent progenitors is strictly regulated, resulting in high human cell diversity. Epigenetic modifications also orchestrate cell fate restriction. Unveiling the epigenetic mechanisms underlying human cell diversity has been di ...
Dendritic cells (DCs) are specialized myeloid cells with the ability to uptake, process, and
present antigens to T lymphocytes. They also generate cytokine and chemokine gradients that
regulate immune cell trafficking, activation, and function. Monocyte-de ...
Neuroprostheses have been used clinically for decades, to help restore or preserve brain functions, when pharmaceutical treatments are inefficient. Although great progress in the field has been made over the years to interface with the nervous system, surf ...
Borrowing some quotes from Harper Lee's novel "To Kill A Mockingbird" to help frame our manuscript, we discuss methods to profile local proteomes. We initially focus on chemical biology regimens that function in live organisms and use reactive biotin speci ...
The advent of immunotherapy, such as immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) and adoptive transfer of cytotoxic lymphocytes, has transformed the clinical care of cancer. However, a significant proportion of patients are resistant to immunotherapy or experience re ...
We developed a method for generating dendritic cell progenitors (DCPs) from hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells isolated from bone marrow or blood. When engineered to express IL-12 and FLT3L, these DCPs reprogram the tumor microenvironment and elicit a ...