albert einstein college of medicine

4 ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN JoVE

JoVE Core

Telomere Length and Telomerase Activity; A Yin and Yang of Cell Senescence

Mary Derasmo Axelrad¹, Temuri Budagov¹, Gil Atzmon^1,2,3

¹Department of Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine , ²Diabetes Research and Training Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine , ³Department of Genetics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

An accurate, short, sophisticated and cheap method is described that assesses telomere length in multiple tissues and species using qRT-PCR. In addition, we will describe a simple assay to assess telomerase activity as a complementary backbone test for telomere length.

Biology

Reverse Yeast Two-hybrid System to Identify Mammalian Nuclear Receptor Residues that Interact with Ligands and/or Antagonists

Hao Li^*1, Wei Dou^*2, Emil Padikkala¹, Sridhar Mani¹

¹Department of Genetics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine , ²Shanghai Key Laboratory of Complex Prescription and MOE Key Laboratory for Standardization of Chinese Medicines, Institute of Chinese Materia Medica, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Ketoconazole binds to and antagonizes Pregnane X Receptor (PXR) activation. Yeast high throughput screens of PXR mutants define a unique region for ketoconazole binding. This yeast-based genetic method discovers novel nuclear receptor interactions with ligands that associate with surface binding sites.

Biology

Using Microfluidic Devices to Measure Lifespan and Cellular Phenotypes in Single Budding Yeast Cells

Ke Zou^1,2, Diana S. Ren², Qi Ou-yang^1,3, Hao Li², Jiashun Zheng²

¹The State Key Laboratory for Artificial Microstructures and Mesoscopic Physics, School of Physics, Peking University, ²Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, ³Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences at Center for Quantitative Biology, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University

This article presents a protocol optimized for the production of microfluidic chips and the setup of microfluidic experiments to measure the lifespan and cellular phenotypes of single yeast cells.

Chemistry

Methionine Functionalized Biocompatible Block Copolymers for Targeted Plasmid DNA Delivery

Yang Wu^*1, Wei Zhang^*2, Jian Zhang², Zhi-Xiang Mao³, Li Ding², Hao Li³, Rong Ma¹, Jin-Hai Tang²

¹Research Center of Clinical Oncology, Jiangsu Cancer Hospital & Jiangsu Institute of Cancer Research & Nanjing Medical University Affiliated Cancer Hospital, ²Department of General Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital with Nanjing Medical University, ³School of Clinical Medicine, Xuzhou Medical University

This work presents the preparation of methionine functionalized biocompatible block copolymers (mBG) via the reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) method. The plasmid DNA complexing ability of the obtained mBG and their transfection efficiency were also investigated. The RAFT method is very beneficial for polymerizing monomers containing special functional groups.