How NGS is Helping in Discovering New Drug Targets for Cancer
Introduction The next-generation sequencing (NGS) has become one of the best approaches in the field of therapeutic diagnosis and treatment. With the help of NGS, complex pathophysiological diseases like cancer can have a potential drug for treatment. Globally, cancer is considered a …
Role of Bioinformatics in Molecular Biology Research
Introduction Molecular biology, as the terminology describes, is the study of life at molecular level. It is the field of science that is concerned with chemical structures and a variety of biological processes that includes the basic units of life i.e., nucleic …
Cancer Pharmacogenomics
What is Cancer Pharmacogenomics? Pharmacogenomics is the study of genetic factors that influence drug efficacy and toxicity. These studies aim to elucidate the genetic variation that is present across individuals affecting pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics. If the association is found to be reproducible …
Cancer Genomics
What Is Cancer Genomics? The 21st century is the era of technology and innovation. With advancements in techniques and the development of high throughput sequencing like Next-generation sequencing (NGS) and various computational analysis, genetics and molecular biology are transformed. Cancer is also …
ChIP-Seq: Finding Transcription Factor Binding Sites
What are Transcription Factor Binding Sites? Gene expression regulation is done by transcription factors (TFs). They control the transcription of genes and hence gene expression. They are involved in initiating transcription depending upon the type of cells, disease status, and stage of …
ATAC-Seq: Finding Open Chromatin Regions
Understanding Open Chromatin Regions (OCr) The DNA is a highly condensed molecule that reaches its final form after going through three hierarchies i.e., nucleosome, chromatin, and chromosomes. Among these hierarchies, chromatin is important as it changes into euchromatin and heterochromatin forms, depending …
Enrichment Analysis: Gene Ontology and KEGG Pathways Analysis
Introduction: The turn of the millennium has brought many high-throughput ‘omics’ techniques which have resulted in the generation of a huge amount of data. These techniques have enabled us to quantify thousands of genes at the same time and identify many significant …
Single Cell RNA-Seq
What is Single-Cell RNA-Seq (scRNA-seq)? Single-cell RNA Sequencing technology is a high-throughput method to understand gene expression at the resolution of single cells. Their development has revolutionized the study of transcriptomes as previously the cells were considered homogenous during transcriptomics analysis but …
Computational Drug Discovery
Introduction New pharmaceutical drugs are developed through a systematic process of “Drug Discovery”. We know that the recent decade has seen the development of medical sciences-related computational tools and algorithms, some of them are also extended to drug discovery. The implementation of …
Phagocytes: Neutrophils, Monocytes and Macrophages
Phagocytes Phagocytes are immune cells that play a critical role in both the early and late stages of immune responses. Their main role is to circulate and migrate through tissues to ingest and destroy both microbes and cellular debris. There are three main groups …
Components Of Innate Immunity
The components of the innate immune system includes: Epithelial cells and Sentinel cells in tissues (macrophages, dendritic cells, mast cells, and others), Innate lymphoid cells, including NK cells and several plasma proteins. Epithelial Barriers The major interfaces between the body and the …
Cellular Receptors for Microbes
Cellular Receptors for Microbes and Damaged Cells The receptors used by the innate immune system to react against microbes and damaged cells are expressed on phagocytes, dendritic cells, and many other cell types. These are expressed in different cellular compartments where microbes …
