SpinalTRAQ: A novel pipeline for volumetric cervical spinal cord analysis identifies the corticospinal tract synaptic projectome in healthy and post-stroke mice.

The corticospinal tract (CST) is essential for forelimb-specific fine motor skills. In rodents, it undergoes extensive structural remodeling across development, injury, and disease states, with major implications for motor function. A vast body of literature, spanning numerous injury models, frequently assesses these projections.

Upcycling human excrement: the gut microbiome to soil microbiome axis.

Human excrement composting (HEC) is a sustainable strategy for human excrement (HE) management that recycles nutrients and mitigates health risks while reducing reliance on freshwater, fossil fuels, and fertilizers. A mixture of HE and bulking material was collected from 15 composting toilets and composted as 15 biological replicates in modified 19-liter buckets under mesophilic conditions with weekly sampling for one year. We hypothesized that (i) the microbiome of 1 year old compost would resemble that of a soil and/or food and landscape waste compost microbiome more closely than the original HE; and (ii) the human fecal indicators, and , would be undetectable after 52 weeks using qPCR and culturing.

Spontaneous pathology in PS19 tauopathy mice progresses via brain networks.

Tauopathies are progressive neurodegenerative diseases characterized by cellular accumulation of the microtubule-associated protein tau. Evidence suggests tau is a prion, propagating pathology across brain networks via unique transmissible assemblies which mediate distinct neuropathologies in model systems. Neuroimaging has identified network alterations reflecting distinct patterns of brain atrophy in tauopathy patients.

Discovery of a brain penetrant SGK1 inhibitor using a ligand- and structure-based virtual screening methodology.

Serum and glucocorticoid-regulated kinase 1 (SGK1) is an underexplored kinase involved in several neurodegenerative diseases. Although SGK1 inhibitors are not available on the market, the absence of side effects in two SGK1 knockout mouse models supports the development of brain-penetrant SGK1 inhibitors to explore their therapeutic potential. Through a combined ligand- and target-based virtual screening using the ECBL, we identified a small heterocyclic molecule with SGK1 inhibitory activity (IC = 0.

An unbiased proteomic platform for ATE1-based arginylation profiling.

Protein arginylation is an essential post-translational modification catalyzed by arginyl-tRNA-protein transferase 1 (ATE1) in mammalian systems. Arginylation features a post-translational conjugation of an arginyl to a protein, making it extremely challenging to differentiate from translational arginine residues with the same mass. Here we present a general ATE1-based arginylation profiling platform for the unbiased discovery of arginylation substrates and their precise modification sites.