Hyperglycemia Alters Expression of Cerebral Metabolic Genes after Cardiac Arrest.

BACKGROUND: Survivors of cardiac arrest often experience neurologic deficits. To date, treatment options are limited. Associated hyperglycemia is believed to further worsen the neurologic outcome. The aim with this study was to characterize expression pathways induced by hyperglycemia in conjunction with global brain ischemia. METHODS: Pigs were randomized to high or normal glucose levels, as regulated by glucose and insulin infusions with target levels of 8.5-10 mM and 4-5.5 mM, respectively. The animals were subjected to 5-minute cardiac arrest followed by 8 minutes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and direct-current shock to restore spontaneous circulation. Global expression profiling of the cortex using microarrays was performed in both groups. RESULTS: A total of 102 genes differed in expression at P < .001 between the hyperglycemic and the normoglycemic pigs. Several of the most strongly differentially regulated genes were involved in transport and metabolism of glucose. Functional clustering using bioinformatics tools revealed enrichment of multiple biological processes, including membrane processes, ion transport, and glycoproteins. CONCLUSIONS: Hyperglycemia during cardiac arrest leads to differential early gene expression compared with normoglycemia. The functional relevance of these expressional changes cannot be deduced from the current study; however, the identified candidates have been linked to neuroprotective mechanisms and constitute interesting targets for further studies.

TARSyn: Tunable Antibiotic Resistance Devices Enabling Bacterial Synthetic Evolution and Protein Production.

Evolution can be harnessed to optimize synthetic biology designs. A prominent example is recombinant protein production-a dominating theme in biotechnology for more than three decades. Typically, a protein coding sequence (cds) is recombined with genetic elements, such as promoters, ribosome binding sites and terminators, which control expression in a cell factory. A major bottleneck during production is translational initiation. Previously we identified more effective translation initiation regions (TIRs) by creating sequence libraries and then selecting for a TIR that drives high-level expression-an example of synthetic evolution. However, manual screening limits the ability to assay expression levels of all putative sequences in the libraries. Here we have solved this bottleneck by designing a collection of translational coupling devices based on a RNA secondary structure. Exchange of different sequence elements in this device allows for different coupling efficiencies, therefore giving the devices a tunable nature. Sandwiching these devices between the cds and an antibiotic selection marker that functions over a broad dynamic range of antibiotic concentrations adds to the tunability and allows expression levels in large clone libraries to be probed using a simple cell survival assay on the respective antibiotic. The power of the approach is demonstrated by substantially increasing production of two commercially interesting proteins, a Nanobody and an Affibody. The method is a simple and inexpensive alternative to advanced screening techniques that can be carried out in any laboratory.