Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0042875 (vitamin E deficiency)
 916 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Pre-term neonates and neonates in general exhibit physiological vitamin E deficiency and are at increased risk for the development of acute lung diseases. Apoptosis is a major cause of acute lung damage in alveolar type II cells. In this paper, we evaluated the hypothesis that vitamin E deficiency predisposes alveolar type II cells to apoptosis. Therefore, we measured markers of apoptosis in alveolar type II cells isolated from control rats, vitamin E deficient rats and deficient rats that were re-fed a vitamin E-enriched diet. Bax and cytosolic cytochrome c increased, and the mitochondrial transmembrane potential and Hsp25 expression was reduced in vitamin E deficiency. Furthermore, increased DNA-fragmentation and numbers of early and late apoptotic cells were seen, but caspases 3 and 8 activities and expression of Fas, Bcl-2, Bcl-x and p53 remained unchanged. Vitamin E depletion did not change the GSH/GSSG ratio and the activities of antioxidant enzymes. Thus, vitamin E deficiency may induce a reversible pro-apoptotic response in lung cells and sensitise them for additional insult. In agreement with this hypothesis, we demonstrate that in vivo hyperoxia alone does not induce apoptosis in type II cells of control rats but reversibly increases DNA-fragmentation and numbers of early apoptotic type II cells in vitamin E-depleted cells.
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PMID:Vitamin E deficiency sensitizes alveolar type II cells for apoptosis. 1206 53

Protein function is related to protein structure, and understanding disease-associated structural changes is critical both to understanding protein-mediated illness and to developing clinical therapies. We have developed a visual analytics tool called ContactWalker that uses molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the structural and physical differences between wild type and disease-associated protein structures. This tool has been used successfully to characterize the effects of the disease ataxia with vitamin E deficiency (AVED). We are now beginning to investigate mutations to other disease-associated proteins including the tumor suppressor protein p53.
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PMID:Analyzing disease-associated protein structures with visual analytics. 2430 93