TY - JOUR A1 - Othman, Eman M. A1 - Bekhit, Amany A. A1 - Anany, Mohamed A. A1 - Dandekar, Thomas A1 - Ragab, Hanan M. A1 - Wahid, Ahmed T1 - Design, Synthesis, and Anticancer Screening for Repurposed Pyrazolo[3,4-d]pyrimidine Derivatives on Four Mammalian Cancer Cell Lines JF - Molecules N2 - The present study reports the synthesis of new purine bioisosteres comprising a pyrazolo[3,4-d]pyrimidine scaffold linked to mono-, di-, and trimethoxy benzylidene moieties through hydrazine linkages. First, in silico docking experiments of the synthesized compounds against Bax, Bcl-2, Caspase-3, Ki67, p21, and p53 were performed in a trial to rationalize the observed cytotoxic activity for the tested compounds. The anticancer activity of these compounds was evaluated in vitro against Caco-2, A549, HT1080, and Hela cell lines. Results revealed that two (5 and 7) of the three synthesized compounds (5, 6, and 7) showed high cytotoxic activity against all tested cell lines with IC50 values in the micro molar concentration. Our in vitro results show that there is no significant apoptotic effect for the treatment with the experimental compounds on the viability of cells against A549 cells. Ki67 expression was found to decrease significantly following the treatment of cells with the most promising candidate: drug 7. The overall results indicate that these pyrazolopyrimidine derivatives possess anticancer activity at varying doses. The suggested mechanism of action involves the inhibition of the proliferation of cancer cells. KW - pyrazolo[3,4-d]pyrimidine KW - anticancer activity KW - apoptosis KW - Ki67 Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-239734 SN - 1420-3049 VL - 26 IS - 10 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Li, Kunkun A1 - Prada, Juan A1 - Damineli, Daniel S. C. A1 - Liese, Anja A1 - Romeis, Tina A1 - Dandekar, Thomas A1 - Feijó, José A. A1 - Hedrich, Rainer A1 - Konrad, Kai Robert T1 - An optimized genetically encoded dual reporter for simultaneous ratio imaging of Ca\(^{2+}\) and H\(^{+}\) reveals new insights into ion signaling in plants JF - New Phytologist N2 - Whereas the role of calcium ions (Ca\(^{2+}\)) in plant signaling is well studied, the physiological significance of pH‐changes remains largely undefined. Here we developed CapHensor, an optimized dual‐reporter for simultaneous Ca\(^{2+}\) and pH ratio‐imaging and studied signaling events in pollen tubes (PTs), guard cells (GCs), and mesophyll cells (MCs). Monitoring spatio‐temporal relationships between membrane voltage, Ca\(^{2+}\)‐ and pH‐dynamics revealed interconnections previously not described. In tobacco PTs, we demonstrated Ca\(^{2+}\)‐dynamics lag behind pH‐dynamics during oscillatory growth, and pH correlates more with growth than Ca\(^{2+}\). In GCs, we demonstrated abscisic acid (ABA) to initiate stomatal closure via rapid cytosolic alkalization followed by Ca2+ elevation. Preventing the alkalization blocked GC ABA‐responses and even opened stomata in the presence of ABA, disclosing an important pH‐dependent GC signaling node. In MCs, a flg22‐induced membrane depolarization preceded Ca2+‐increases and cytosolic acidification by c. 2 min, suggesting a Ca\(^{2+}\)/pH‐independent early pathogen signaling step. Imaging Ca2+ and pH resolved similar cytosol and nuclear signals and demonstrated flg22, but not ABA and hydrogen peroxide to initiate rapid membrane voltage‐, Ca\(^{2+}\)‐ and pH‐responses. We propose close interrelation in Ca\(^{2+}\)‐ and pH‐signaling that is cell type‐ and stimulus‐specific and the pH having crucial roles in regulating PT growth and stomata movement. KW - abscisic acid (ABA) KW - calcium KW - flg22 KW - guard cells KW - imaging KW - ion signaling KW - pH KW - pollen tube Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-239847 VL - 230 IS - 6 SP - 2292 EP - 2310 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Breitenbach, Tim A1 - Helfrich-Förster, Charlotte A1 - Dandekar, Thomas T1 - An effective model of endogenous clocks and external stimuli determining circadian rhythms JF - Scientific Reports N2 - Circadian endogenous clocks of eukaryotic organisms are an established and rapidly developing research field. To investigate and simulate in an effective model the effect of external stimuli on such clocks and their components we developed a software framework for download and simulation. The application is useful to understand the different involved effects in a mathematical simple and effective model. This concerns the effects of Zeitgebers, feedback loops and further modifying components. We start from a known mathematical oscillator model, which is based on experimental molecular findings. This is extended with an effective framework that includes the impact of external stimuli on the circadian oscillations including high dose pharmacological treatment. In particular, the external stimuli framework defines a systematic procedure by input-output-interfaces to couple different oscillators. The framework is validated by providing phase response curves and ranges of entrainment. Furthermore, Aschoffs rule is computationally investigated. It is shown how the external stimuli framework can be used to study biological effects like points of singularity or oscillators integrating different signals at once. The mathematical framework and formalism is generic and allows to study in general the effect of external stimuli on oscillators and other biological processes. For an easy replication of each numerical experiment presented in this work and an easy implementation of the framework the corresponding Mathematica files are fully made available. They can be downloaded at the following link: https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/bioinfo/computing/circadian/. KW - computational biology and bioinformatics KW - systems biology Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-261655 VL - 11 IS - 1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Shityakov, Sergey A1 - Skorb, Ekaterina V. A1 - Förster, Carola Y. A1 - Dandekar, Thomas T1 - Scaffold Searching of FDA and EMA-Approved Drugs Identifies Lead Candidates for Drug Repurposing in Alzheimer’s Disease JF - Frontiers in Chemistry N2 - Clinical trials of novel therapeutics for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) have consumed a significant amount of time and resources with largely negative results. Repurposing drugs already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), European Medicines Agency (EMA), or Worldwide for another indication is a more rapid and less expensive option. Therefore, we apply the scaffold searching approach based on known amyloid-beta (Aβ) inhibitor tramiprosate to screen the DrugCentral database (n = 4,642) of clinically tested drugs. As a result, menadione bisulfite and camphotamide substances with protrombogenic and neurostimulation/cardioprotection effects were identified as promising Aβ inhibitors with an improved binding affinity (ΔGbind) and blood-brain barrier permeation (logBB). Finally, the data was also confirmed by molecular dynamics simulations using implicit solvation, in particular as Molecular Mechanics Generalized Born Surface Area (MM-GBSA) model. Overall, the proposed in silico pipeline can be implemented through the early stage rational drug design to nominate some lead candidates for AD, which will be further validated in vitro and in vivo, and, finally, in a clinical trial. KW - scaffold search KW - approved drugs KW - drug repurposing KW - alzheimer's disease KW - chemical similarity KW - molecular modeling Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-248703 SN - 2296-2646 VL - 9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Liang, Chunguang A1 - Bencurova, Elena A1 - Psota, Eric A1 - Neurgaonkar, Priya A1 - Prelog, Martina A1 - Scheller, Carsten A1 - Dandekar, Thomas T1 - Population-predicted MHC class II epitope presentation of SARS-CoV-2 structural proteins correlates to the case fatality rates of COVID-19 in different countries JF - International Journal of Molecular Sciences N2 - We observed substantial differences in predicted Major Histocompatibility Complex II (MHCII) epitope presentation of SARS-CoV-2 proteins for different populations but only minor differences in predicted MHCI epitope presentation. A comparison of this predicted epitope MHC-coverage revealed for the early phase of infection spread (till day 15 after reaching 128 observed infection cases) highly significant negative correlations with the case fatality rate. Specifically, this was observed in different populations for MHC class II presentation of the viral spike protein (p-value: 0.0733 for linear regression), the envelope protein (p-value: 0.023), and the membrane protein (p-value: 0.00053), indicating that the high case fatality rates of COVID-19 observed in some countries seem to be related with poor MHC class II presentation and hence weak adaptive immune response against these viral envelope proteins. Our results highlight the general importance of the SARS-CoV-2 structural proteins in immunological control in early infection spread looking at a global census in various countries and taking case fatality rate into account. Other factors such as health system and control measures become more important after the early spread. Our study should encourage further studies on MHCII alleles as potential risk factors in COVID-19 including assessment of local populations and specific allele distributions. KW - COVID-19 KW - population coverage KW - MHC II KW - MHC I KW - B-cell KW - T-cell KW - epitope mapping KW - lethality rate KW - infection spread KW - SARS-CoV-2 Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-258936 SN - 1422-0067 VL - 22 IS - 5 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Dandekar, Thomas A1 - Bencurova, Elena A1 - Osmanoglu, Özge A1 - Naseem, Muhammad T1 - Klimapflanzen und biologische Wege zu negativen Kohlendioxidemissionen JF - BIOspektrum N2 - Climate plants are critical to prevent global warming as all efforts to save carbon dioxide are too slow and climate disasters on the rise. For best carbon dioxide harvesting we compare algae, trees and crop plants and use metagenomic analysis of environmental samples. We compare different pathways, carbon harvesting potentials of different plants as well as synthetic modifications including carbon dioxide flux balance analysis. For implementation, agriculture and modern forestry are important. KW - Klimapflanzen KW - Klimawandel KW - Klimaneutralität Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-270067 SN - 1868-6249 VL - 27 IS - 7 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Naseem, Muhammad A1 - Othman, Eman M. A1 - Fathy, Moustafa A1 - Iqbal, Jibran A1 - Howari, Fares M. A1 - AlRemeithi, Fatima A. A1 - Kodandaraman, Geema A1 - Stopper, Helga A1 - Bencurova, Elena A1 - Vlachakis, Dimitrios A1 - Dandekar, Thomas T1 - Integrated structural and functional analysis of the protective effects of kinetin against oxidative stress in mammalian cellular systems JF - Scientific Reports N2 - Metabolism and signaling of cytokinins was first established in plants, followed by cytokinin discoveries in all kingdoms of life. However, understanding of their role in mammalian cells is still scarce. Kinetin is a cytokinin that mitigates the effects of oxidative stress in mammalian cells. The effective concentrations of exogenously applied kinetin in invoking various cellular responses are not well standardized. Likewise, the metabolism of kinetin and its cellular targets within the mammalian cells are still not well studied. Applying vitality tests as well as comet assays under normal and hyper-oxidative states, our analysis suggests that kinetin concentrations of 500 nM and above cause cytotoxicity as well as genotoxicity in various cell types. However, concentrations below 100 nM do not cause any toxicity, rather in this range kinetin counteracts oxidative burst and cytotoxicity. We focus here on these effects. To get insights into the cellular targets of kinetin mediating these pro-survival functions and protective effects we applied structural and computational approaches on two previously testified targets for these effects. Our analysis deciphers vital residues in adenine phosphoribosyltransferase (APRT) and adenosine receptor (A2A-R) that facilitate the binding of kinetin to these two important human cellular proteins. We finally discuss how the therapeutic potential of kinetin against oxidative stress helps in various pathophysiological conditions. KW - cytokinins KW - 6-benzylaminopurine Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-231317 VL - 10 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ahmed, Zeeshan A1 - Zeeshan, Saman A1 - Dandekar, Thomas T1 - Mining biomedical images towards valuable information retrieval in biomedical and life sciences JF - Database - The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation N2 - Biomedical images are helpful sources for the scientists and practitioners in drawing significant hypotheses, exemplifying approaches and describing experimental results in published biomedical literature. In last decades, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of heterogeneous biomedical image production and publication, which results in a need for bioimaging platforms for feature extraction and analysis of text and content in biomedical images to take advantage in implementing effective information retrieval systems. In this review, we summarize technologies related to data mining of figures. We describe and compare the potential of different approaches in terms of their developmental aspects, used methodologies, produced results, achieved accuracies and limitations. Our comparative conclusions include current challenges for bioimaging software with selective image mining, embedded text extraction and processing of complex natural language queries. KW - humans KW - software KW - image processing KW - animals KW - computer-assisted KW - data mining/methods KW - natural language processing Y1 - 2016 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-162697 VL - 2016 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Caliskan, Aylin A1 - Crouch, Samantha A. W. A1 - Giddins, Sara A1 - Dandekar, Thomas A1 - Dangwal, Seema T1 - Progeria and aging — Omics based comparative analysis JF - Biomedicines N2 - Since ancient times aging has also been regarded as a disease, and humankind has always strived to extend the natural lifespan. Analyzing the genes involved in aging and disease allows for finding important indicators and biological markers for pathologies and possible therapeutic targets. An example of the use of omics technologies is the research regarding aging and the rare and fatal premature aging syndrome progeria (Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, HGPS). In our study, we focused on the in silico analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in progeria and aging, using a publicly available RNA-Seq dataset (GEO dataset GSE113957) and a variety of bioinformatics tools. Despite the GSE113957 RNA-Seq dataset being well-known and frequently analyzed, the RNA-Seq data shared by Fleischer et al. is far from exhausted and reusing and repurposing the data still reveals new insights. By analyzing the literature citing the use of the dataset and subsequently conducting a comparative analysis comparing the RNA-Seq data analyses of different subsets of the dataset (healthy children, nonagenarians and progeria patients), we identified several genes involved in both natural aging and progeria (KRT8, KRT18, ACKR4, CCL2, UCP2, ADAMTS15, ACTN4P1, WNT16, IGFBP2). Further analyzing these genes and the pathways involved indicated their possible roles in aging, suggesting the need for further in vitro and in vivo research. In this paper, we (1) compare “normal aging” (nonagenarians vs. healthy children) and progeria (HGPS patients vs. healthy children), (2) enlist genes possibly involved in both the natural aging process and progeria, including the first mention of IGFBP2 in progeria, (3) predict miRNAs and interactomes for WNT16 (hsa-mir-181a-5p), UCP2 (hsa-mir-26a-5p and hsa-mir-124-3p), and IGFBP2 (hsa-mir-124-3p, hsa-mir-126-3p, and hsa-mir-27b-3p), (4) demonstrate the compatibility of well-established R packages for RNA-Seq analysis for researchers interested but not yet familiar with this kind of analysis, and (5) present comparative proteomics analyses to show an association between our RNA-Seq data analyses and corresponding changes in protein expression. KW - progeria KW - aging KW - omics KW - RNA sequencing KW - bioinformatics KW - sun exposure KW - HGPS KW - IGFBP2 KW - ACKR4 KW - WNT Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-289868 SN - 2227-9059 VL - 10 IS - 10 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Othman, Eman M. A1 - Fathy, Moustafa A1 - Bekhit, Amany Abdlrehim A1 - Abdel-Razik, Abdel-Razik H. A1 - Jamal, Arshad A1 - Nazzal, Yousef A1 - Shams, Shabana A1 - Dandekar, Thomas A1 - Naseem, Muhammad T1 - Modulatory and toxicological perspectives on the effects of the small molecule kinetin JF - Molecules N2 - Plant hormones are small regulatory molecules that exert pharmacological actions in mammalian cells such as anti-oxidative and pro-metabolic effects. Kinetin belongs to the group of plant hormones cytokinin and has been associated with modulatory functions in mammalian cells. The mammalian adenosine receptor (A2a-R) is known to modulate multiple physiological responses in animal cells. Here, we describe that kinetin binds to the adenosine receptor (A2a-R) through the Asn253 residue in an adenosine dependent manner. To harness the beneficial effects of kinetin for future human use, we assess its acute toxicity by analyzing different biochemical and histological markers in rats. Kinetin at a dose below 1 mg/kg had no adverse effects on the serum level of glucose or on the activity of serum alanine transaminase (ALT) or aspartate aminotransferase (AST) enzymes in the kinetin treated rats. Whereas, creatinine levels increased after a kinetin treatment at a dose of 0.5 mg/kg. Furthermore, 5 mg/kg treated kinetin rats showed normal renal corpuscles, but a mild degeneration was observed in the renal glomeruli and renal tubules, as well as few degenerated hepatocytes were also observed in the liver. Kinetin doses below 5 mg/kg did not show any localized toxicity in the liver and kidney tissues. In addition to unraveling the binding interaction between kinetin and A2a-R, our findings suggest safe dose limits for the future use of kinetin as a therapeutic and modulatory agent against various pathophysiological conditions. KW - cytokinin kinetin KW - modulatory effects KW - in vivo toxicity KW - A2a-R receptor Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-223064 SN - 1420-3049 VL - 26 IS - 3 ER -