Background: Tauopathies, including Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, are diseases characterized by the formation of pathological tau protein aggregates in the brain and progressive neurodegeneration. Presently no effective disease-modifying treatments exist for tauopathies. Methods: To identify drugs targeting tau neurotoxicity, we have used a Caenorhabditis elegans model of tauopathy to screen a drug library containing […]

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and induced pluripotent cells have the potential to provide an unlimited source of tissues for regenerative medicine. For this purpose, development of defined/xeno-free culture systems under feeder-free conditions is essential for the expansion of hESCs. Most defined/xeno-free media for the culture of hESCs contain basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF). Therefore, […]

Recently, a number of chemical and drug screens using zebrafish embryos have been published. Using zebrafish dystrophin mutants, we screened a chemical library for small molecules that modulate the muscle phenotype and identified seven small molecules that influence muscle pathology in dystrophin-null zebrafish. One chemical, aminophylline, which is known to be a non-selective phosphodiesterase (PDE) […]

In Gram-negative bacteria, production of the signal molecule c-di-GMP by diguanylate cyclases (DGCs) is a key trigger for biofilm formation, which, in turn, is often required for the development of chronic bacterial infections. Thus, DGCs represent interesting targets for new chemotherapeutic drugs with anti-biofilm activity. We searched for inhibitors of the WspR protein, a Pseudomonas […]

The lysine acetyltransferase (KAT) Rtt109 forms a complex with Vps75 and catalyzes the acetylation of histone H3 lysine 56 (H3K56ac) in the Asf1-H3-H4 complex. Rtt109 and H3K56ac are vital for replication-coupled nucleosome assembly and genotoxic resistance in yeast and pathogenic fungal species such as Candida albicans. Remarkably, sequence homologs of Rtt109 are absent in humans. […]