细胞功能测定

The mitochondrial regulation of cell death involves the release of proapoptotic factors, such as cytochrome c, Smac-DIABLO, AIF, OMI/HtrA2, by disruption of the outer mitochondrial membrane (OMM) permeability barrier that is controlled by pro- and antiapoptotic proteins of the Bcl-2 f ...

Many cell cycle regulatory proteins have been shown to be able to regulate cell death. Activation of Cdk2 has been shown to be necessary for apoptosis of quiescent cells such as thymocytes, neurons, and endothelial cells. This activation is stimulus-specific because it occurs in glucocorti ...

Paramount to the maintenance of normal tissue homeostasis is the induction of programmed cell death, otherwise known as apoptosis. Several disease states, including cancer, are characterized by an inability to remove unwanted cells due to a failure to commit to apoptosis. What is more, apop ...

The technique of electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy is more than 50 years old, but only recently it has been used for in vivo studies. Its limited application in the past was due to the problem of high nonresonant dielectric loss of the exciting frequency because of high water conte ...

Autophagy (Greek: Self digestion) is an intracellular process involved in removal of damaged or misfolded proteins or organelles. Damaged or misfolded proteins or organelles are first engulfed in a membraneous structure called autophagosome, and then the autophagosome fuse with l ...

Nitric oxide (NO) is an important signaling molecule that plays a key role in various physiological and pathological processes. One of the well-established mechanisms by which NO regulates the function of various target proteins is through S-nitrosylation. NO readily reacts with thiol ...

Enhanced expression of transglutaminases is a frequent, though not obligatory phenomenon in apoptosis, which is associated with cells dying in steady interaction with their tissue environment. Modification of cellular proteins by transglutamination is a tightly controlled ...

Necroptosis is a mechanism of necrotic cell death induced by external stimuli in the form of death domain receptor (DR) engagement by their respective ligands, TNF-alpha, Fas ligand (FasL) and TRAIL, under conditions when apoptotic cell death execution is prevented, e.g. by caspase inhibit ...

Apoptosis is a fundamental process required for proper embryonic development. Various methods have been described to detect apoptosis both in vitro as well as in vivo. Activation of caspases represents the key event in the apoptotic process. To dissect the molecular events leading to casp ...

TUNEL-based assays were used to demonstrate the presence of apoptotic cells in tissue sections derived from target tissues of animal models of different diseases. Emphasis was placed on tissue preparation and fixation, as these are crucial to successful histological staining. The pro ...

Live cell imaging allows several key apoptotic events to be visualized in a single cell over time. These include mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization (MOMP), mitochondrial dysfunction, phosphatidylserine exposure, and membrane permeabilization. Here we describe a ...

An apoptosing cell demonstrates multitude of characteristic morphological and biochemical features, which vary depending on the stimuli and the cell type. The gross majority of classical apoptotic hallmarks can be rapidly examined by flow and image cytometry. Cytometry thus beca ...

Apoptotic cell death is characterised by various morphological and biochemical changes. Cysteine proteases of the caspase family play key roles in the execution of apoptosis and in the maturation of proinflammatory cytokines. During apoptosis signalling, caspase precursors u ...

The paternal genome in many animal taxa is efficiently packaged into the sperm nucleus by switching from a histone (nucleosome)-based chromatin configuration to one using predominantly protamines. Nonetheless, various studies have shown that some nucleosomes, often containi ...

Epigenetic modifications on the DNA sequence (DNA methylation) or on chromatin-associated proteins (i.e., histones) comprise the “cellular epigenome”; together these modifications play an important role in the regulation of gene expression. Unlike the genome, the epigenome is hi ...

Protamines, sperm-specific nuclear proteins, are essential for sperm chromatin condensation and DNA stabilization. They are small, highly basic, and rich in disulfide bonds. Under reducing conditions, protamines, along with other basic proteins, are soluble in acid solutions. Be ...

The isolation of mammalian sperm heads from their tails is complicated by the relatively high density of the tails, but facilitated by the fact that protamine condensation of the sperm chromatin and the insolubility of the perinuclear theca make the sperm nucleus stable in sodium dodecyl sul ...

In this chapter, the laboratory methods for detection of sperm biomarkers that are aimed at identifying arrested sperm development are summarized. These probes include sperm staining with aniline blue for persistent histones, representing a break in the histone-transition prote ...

Proteomics is the study of the proteins of cells or tissues. Sperm proteomics aims at the identification of the proteins that compose the sperm cell and the study of their function. The recent developments in mass spectrometry (MS) have markedly increased the throughput for the identificati ...

Rapidly advancing tools for genetic analysis on a genome-wide scale have been instrumental in identifying the genetic bases for many complex diseases. About half of male infertility cases are of unknown etiology in spite of tremendous efforts to characterize the genetic basis for the diso ...