前沿科技及其它

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small, nonprotein-coding RNAs that negatively regulate their mRNA target genes in a sequence-specific manner. While their specific impact on biological processes and cellular functions remain largely unknown, dysregulated miRNAs have been implicated ...

The miRNA mimic technology (miR-Mimic) is an innovative approach for gene silencing. This approach is to generate nonnatural double-stranded miRNA-like RNA fragments. Such an RNA fragment is designed to have its 5′-end bearing a partially complementary motif to the selected sequence in t ...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are negative gene regulators acting at the 3′UTR level, modulating the translation of cancer-related genes. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within the 3′UTRs could impact the miRNA-dependent gene regulation either by weakening or by reinforcing the b ...

Determination of gene expression is essential for understanding the role of a given gene in normal cell growth or disease processes. Recently, newly described microRNAs have been shown to play a key role in the regulation of gene expression; in particular, deregulation of microRNAs is often as ...

Aberrant expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) and processing defects in their biogenesis pathway are a widespread phenomenon in tumors, conveying great importance to the analysis of miRNA expression, regulation, and biogenesis to gain knowledge about their role in cancer. Besides Dro ...

Micro RNA (miRNAs) are a class of 17–25 nucleotides noncoding RNAs that have been shown to have critical functions in a wide variety of biological processes. Measuring quantity of miRNAs in tissues of different physiological and pathological conditions is an important first step to invest ...

MicroRNA (miRNA), a large and growing class of 18–24-nucleotide long, noncoding RNA molecules in all known animal and plant genomes, is a key player in gene regulation. The functions of miRNA are yet to be understood with respect to how and where it is produced and the changes within an organism associat ...

The ability of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) to act as a surrogate window into the presence and physiologic effects of pancreatic cancer is becoming increasingly apparent. In this chapter, we describe the techniques for isolation, lysis, RNA extraction, cDNA synthesis, and Q ...

Sequencing analyses have been invaluable in identifying the genes associated with pancreatic �carcinogenesis. However, whereas gene discovery related to carcinogenesis can be fairly straightforward, there are several additional aspects of experimental design that need ...

Profiling experiments in whole tissue biopsies have linked altered expression of microRNAs (miRNAs) to different types of cancer, including pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Emerging evidence indicates that altered miRNA expression can occur in different cellular c ...

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is a valuable tool to visualize the distribution and localization of specific cellular components within morphologically preserved tissue sections or cell preparations. It combines the histologic morphology of tissues for detecting the actual a ...

Tissue microarrays (TMAs) enable high-throughput tissue analysis by selecting a large number of �paraffin-embedded donor tissue block cores and transferring these tissue cores into a positionally encoded array in the recipient TMA block. Once TMAs are constructed, a variety of anal ...

Genome-wide RNA interference screening has emerged as a powerful tool for functional genomic studies of disease-related phenotypes and the discovery of molecular therapeutic targets for human diseases. Commercial short hairpin RNA (shRNA) libraries are commonly used in this are ...

RNA interference (RNAi) has emerged as a powerful genetic strategy to functionally interrogate the entire genome by loss-of-function studies. In the last years, several arrayed shRNA libraries that can silence almost all the human genome have been developed. The generation of new and more e ...

The evaluation of tumor angiogenesis in pancreatic cancers involves determining the status of tumor vasculature and hypoxia in the tumor. Describing the nature and extent of tumor angiogenesis involves evaluating the expression of endothelial and perivascular cells within the t ...

In mucins, glycosylation is complex and the most predominant posttranslational modification. Since mucins exhibit differential glycosylation pattern under physiological and pathological conditions, analysis of mucin glycans is important for understanding their sp ...

The use of fluorescent probes can be an easy and quick method to analyze whether or not reactive oxygen species (ROS) are involved in a particular cellular process or the result of a particular drug treatment. ROS activate a variety of cell signaling and death pathways including apoptosis and necro ...

Pancreatic cancer remains a challenging disease, with an overall 5-year survival rate below 5%, the main reason being that it has an extremely high potential for invasion and metastasis. This potential may contribute to the fact that in more than three fourths of patients diagnosed with pancre ...

Pancreatic cancer is a uniformly lethal disease characterized by a strong stromal reaction called desmoplasia. Organ fibrosis is also a feature of chronic pancreatitis a known risk factor for pancreatic cancer. Here we describe a transplantation approach to investigate bone marrow ...

Sphere-forming assays are an in vitro technique to assay both normal and neoplastic cells for clonogenic growth potential. Currently, the identification of adult progenitors in the pancreas remains an area of intense investigation. The use of sphere-forming assays provides a critic ...