İstanbul Medipol University SABITA students Melisa ERYAŞAR, Tuğçe SARIKAYA, Batuhan SARIYILDIZ, Rufeyda YAĞCI, Mohamad Jihad EID were entitled to receive support from 2209-A – Research Project for Undergraduate Students programme. We congratulate our students and wish them continued success. Project topics and summaries;
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a rare neurodegenerative disease. Despite the increasing number of studies in this field, many related aspects and the molecular mechanism underlying the disease are still not fully understood. This project aims to contribute to filling specific research gaps. To this end, the purpose is to complement the clinical and experimental research by implementing an interdisciplinary approach. More specifically, HD monitoring based on internet searches, text mining of HD abstracts and protein network-based bioinformatics analysis will be performed. Overall, this research effort is expected to illuminate understudied aspects and lay the groundwork for more comprehensive studies in this direction.
Mental disorders may adversely affect sperm quality and psychotropic drugs used in the treatment of these mental health problems may have adverse effects on semen parameters and sperm DNA fragmentation levels. PTEN protein is a dual phosphatase that acts as a tumour suppressor and plays a critical role in the regulation of various biological functions such as growth, survival and metabolic regulation. PTEN plays a vital role in regulating sperm motility and acrosome reaction. Abnormal PTEN expression or function in spermatozoa can lead to reduced sperm motility, impaired fertilisation and low pregnancy rates. For the study, semen samples will be collected from two groups of 15 individuals, one each from users and non-users of psychotropic drugs. Sperm DNA fragmentation levels will be analysed by halosperm test and PTEN protein expression by Immunohistochemistry (IHC) and the results will be observed by light microscopy. According to our hypothesis, it is thought that psychotropic drug use increases sperm DNA fragmentation level and this may be related to PTEN protein expression levels.
The research offers a promising and innovative approach in cancer treatment. The study aims to investigate the anti-cancer effects of exosomes obtained from human mesenchymal stem cells isolated from bone marrow on lung, colon and breast cancer cells. The findings show that exosomes can affect the behaviour of cancer cells by altering intercellular communication, increase apoptosis and inhibit tumour formation. This study highlights the potential of exosomes in cancer therapy as an adjunct to cellular therapeutic strategies. Furthermore, the results of this study represent an innovative and promising area of research in the field of cancer therapy.
Odour perception mechanism is an intriguing subject in the field of neurophysiology due to the fact that it contains points that have not yet been fully elucidated on its scientific basis, and it has a very important place in the diagnosis of diseases, ensuring airport security and detecting chemicals. This study aims to investigate the mechanism of odour perception and the effect of anaesthetic agents commonly used in laboratory environments on this mechanism using artificial intelligence. In the first stage of the study, a successful intracranial electrode implantation is aimed to collect odour signals from the olfactory bulb, which transmits odour information to the brain, in the next step. After a two-week recovery period, the experimental phase with three experimental and two control groups will begin. By smelling different odours, data will be collected to study odour perception and odour discrimination and to train our artificial intelligence. After the artificial intelligence reaches the targeted 70% success, the test process based on distinguishing two odours will be started, in which we will test our anaesthetic agents (chloral hydrate, urethane and isoflurane). The data obtained as a result of these will be analysed. The role of anaesthetic agents in this research is planned to provide a dual benefit.
Angelman syndrome (AS) is a rare genetic disorder affecting approximately 500,000 people worldwide. It is caused by a single gene defect caused by loss of function in the UBE3A gene on maternal chromosome 15. There are different types of Angelman syndrome depending on the way the UBE3A gene is represented. These types are: deletion (65-75%), mutation (5-11%), uniparental dizomy (3-7%) and stigmatisation defect (<3%). There is currently no cure for AS, but one of the ways to find an effective treatment is gene editing. These problems can be solved by editing the UBE3A gene. The paternal UBE3A is silenced due to the presence of UBE3A-ATS, which represses the gene in the cis conformation. UBE3A-ATS, SNORD107, SNORD64, SNORD108, SNORD109A, SNORD116 and IPW are composed of multiple genes, but SNORD115, SNORD109B and UBE3A-ATS are expressed only in neurons with SNURF-SNRPN as a promoter. CRISPR/Cas-9 genome editing can generally be divided into three steps: recognition, cleavage and repair. The engineered sgRNA directs Cas-9 and recognises the target sequence in the gene of interest via the 5ʹ-crRNA complementary base pair component. The best way to deliver Cas9 to its target is direct delivery of the CRISPR/Cas9 system as a ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex consisting of Cas9 protein and single guide RNA (sgRNA). The Cas9 enzyme from Staphylococcus aureus (SaCas9) is an RNA-guided endonuclease that cleaves complementary DNA in close proximity to a protospacer adjacent motif (PAM). Its small size allows in vivo application for genome editing in various species. Staphylococcus aureus (SaCas9) has genome editing efficiency comparable to SpCas9 as it is less than 1 kilobase in length. Crystal structures of SaCas9 associated with a single guide RNA (sgRNA) and its double-stranded DNA targets demonstrated the method by which SaCas9 recognises 5′-NNGRRT-3′ PAM. During this research, the three main genes found in UBE3A-ATS, SNURF and PWARSN, both found in all body cells, and SNORD109B, found only in neurons, will be focused on. The aim of this experiment is to inhibit multiple genes in UBE3A-ATS, which are SNORD109B, PWARSN and SNURF-SNRPN, using Sau Cas9, thus activating the paternal gene and analysing which of the genes works better.